HIIUIIIIIIIIIIII: : Ml :,;.l<| 
 
 MlD-VlCTORlAN 
 
 MEMORlESjIil 
 
 iilill 
 
 R,E. FRANC ILLON 
 

 v y\ 
 
MID-VICTORIAN MEMORIES 
 
MID-VICTORIAN 
 MEMORIES 
 
 BY 
 
 R. E. FRANCILLON 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 
 
TO MV NEPHEWS 
 
 FRANCIS JAMES, FRANCIS OLIVER, FRANCIS ROBERT 
 AND FRANCIS EDWARD FRANCILLON 
 
 AND TO MY NIECE 
 
 LUCY ELIZABETH BERNARD 
 
 THESE MEMORIES OF DAYS BEFORE THEIRS 
 
 ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
 
 BY 
 
 R. E. FRANCILLON 
 
 ^ .' i » » < » . > '"V 
 
 D »> <; . > J <J 
 
9t,, 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Introduction — First impressions — A disciple of Dogberry — 
 " Jacob "— Confusion of persons— Fighting with shadows — A bene- 
 diction pp. I-I2 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Gloucester in the 'Forties— Queen Square, Bloomsbury — Play- 
 goer and Critic — A Kiss from the Past . , . pp. 13-25 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 My father and his brothers — Serjeant Talfourd — Edward Lear — 
 Origin of "The Book of Nonsense " — His celibacy . pp. 26-35 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Cheltenham in the 'Fifties — "The capital of India" — Colonel 
 Berkeley — Blues and Yellows — A clerical autocrat — " Speculum 
 Episcopi " — An imperfect anagram — Sons of Robert Burns — The 
 " Prance " pp. 36-44 
 
 vii 
 
 % 
 i 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 " The Greater Wisdom "—School : old style— The Exhibition 
 of '51 — Cheltenham College — Some schoolfellows: Lecky, Pro- 
 fessor H. Jackson, F. W. H. Myers, Briton Riviere, and others 
 
 pp. 45-61 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 A visit to Ireland — Modern language teaching : very old style — 
 A German tour — Llandudno and Bournemouth in the 'fifties — " Pd 
 e'en let them bide ■"' — An old-world village . . pp. 62-73 
 
 CHAPTER Vn 
 
 Trinity Hall— " Ben " Latham— Henry Fawcett— Leslie Stephen 
 — Alsager Hay-Hill — The Chit-Chat Club — Alfred Ainger — 
 Robert Romer — Bryan Walker — The original " Tom Brown " .? — 
 Charles Dilke — Walter Scott Coward— Charles Kingsley's in- 
 augural lecture — Cambridge : a contrast — Beauty and the Beast 
 
 pp. 74-97 
 
 CHAPTER Vni 
 
 In Hall and Chambers— The Berryer banquet : Brougham and 
 Cockburn— Gray's Inn — Rushton 7/. Campbell — An inefificient 
 volunteer — Evenings in Mitre Court — " Atalanta in Calydon " — 
 "Agag"Stott — Fanatici per la musica . . . pp. 98-116 
 
 viii 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Oxford Circuit— Walter John Huddleston— J. J. Powell- 
 Henry Matthews — Dr. Kenealy — Quarter Sessions . pp. 117-125 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ' The Just Judge " — The Law Magazine — Miss Cobb— Andrew 
 Johnson's oath — My first story — John Blackwood — The value of 
 a name pp. 126-138 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 France after Sedan— Tracking a King — A suspected spy — At 
 Meaux— At Lagny — Cool Head and light heart — At Versailles 
 
 pp. 139-152 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 The Globe in the early 'seventies — Dr. Mortimer Granville — 
 Tom " Purnell, idtimus Boheiiioriiin — John Churton Collins 
 
 pp. 153-163 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 The " Decemviri" — Algernon Charles Swinburne — James Mac- 
 Neill Whistler^oseph Knight — The Marston circle — Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti — William Morris — Dr. Richard Garnett — Astro- 
 logy — Philip Bourke Marston — Oliver Madox Brown — Louise 
 Chandler Moulton — "Fiona Macleod"— Arthur O'Shaughnessy — 
 "Nelly" — Mrs. Lynn Linton pp. 164-189 
 
 ix 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 Marriage — John Barnett, the "Father of English Opera" — The 
 Abbe Liszt — At Milan in the 'sixties — Arthur Seymour Sullivan — 
 Frederick Cowen — Mme. Trebelli-Bettini — George Grossmith — 
 Charles Kensington Salaman — Walter Bache . . pp. 190-201 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 "Zelda" — Francis Hindes Groom — Gypsies at Mawgan — 
 Charles Godfrey Leland — The Hardys — John Cordy Jeaffreson — 
 "Joaquin" Miller— No. 84, Gower Street — Agnes Mary Frances 
 Robinson — The Esthetes— "Speranza" — Professor William Minto 
 —Justin M'Carthy pp. 202-214 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 The Gentlonaiis — Richard Gowing — David Christie Murray — 
 Robert Buchanan— Welsh humour — Gustave Dore— Camille Harare 
 — Karl and Mathilde Blind pp. 215-231 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 The Tatler of 1877-8— "Arthur Sketchley "—Swinburne's only 
 novel — Louis Diston Powles — Twelve years' work — Novels and 
 their titles — The "Oasis" — The mystery of Archibald MacNeill — 
 Regent's Park Terrace — Miss Elizabeth Philp — Dr. Franz Huefifer 
 — Ralston — Miss Sheddon — " Hugh Conway " — After-dinner 
 speakers: Sir F. Leighton, Edwin Arnold, Hepworth Dixon — 
 Mrs. Charles Dickens pp. 232-254 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 The Graphic — Arthur Locker — The Globe ag.iin— Captain Car- 
 lisle, and others — The Marvin case — A small beer chronicle : 
 Fog: Fire: "G, A. S." pp. 255-269 
 
 X 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 The White Rose of Wynnstay — Order of the White Rose— The 
 prohibited Mass — The Stuart Exhibition— Whistler a Jacobite — 
 Charles Augustus Howell — The Sobieski Stuarts — Rise and spread 
 of interest in the House of Stuart— Helps to history pp. 270-293 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 Quasi-reminiscences : political ; royal ; dramatic— Some con- 
 trasts—Human limpets — " Let who will be clever" — A memorable 
 decade — Conclusion pp. 294-307 
 
 XI 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 Introduction — First impressions — A disciple of Dog- 
 berry — "Jacob" — Confusion of persons — Fighting with 
 shadows — A benediction 
 
 Everybody who has survived two generations 
 ought to write, and, if possible, to get published, 
 his recollections of them. If, rightly or wrongly, 
 he thinks these to be of any public value, the 
 duty is of course clear ; if, in his own opinion, 
 they are of little or none, his neglect of it is not 
 excused by a self-estimate which may be but 
 indolence in disguise. He must not be put off it 
 even by the sincerest conviction that he is a No- 
 body. He must not say to himself, " Who am 
 I, that my memories should possess the faintest 
 interest for any fellow-creature, man, woman, or 
 child ? " Even though he be actually a Nobody — 
 then he is all the more likely to reflect the period 
 to which he belongs. The interest attaching to 
 the Somebodies of a period, its makers and its 
 influences, is personal to themselves : for that we 
 have all we need in the way of history, biography, 
 correspondence, recollection, criticism : and often, 
 B 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 in the case of the men and women who hav6 
 " caught on," much more than we need. 
 
 But, in getting the impression of a period, it 
 is just its minnows that matter. It is they who 
 in the main compose it ; it is they who undergo 
 its influences ; it is they who represent it. So 
 our typical Nobody will do well to say : " It is 
 true that I am not an interesting person — except, 
 of course, to myself, and to perhaps the few more, 
 old or young, on whom the least interesting of us 
 can scarcely, thank Heaven, fail to reckon. But 
 I have lived through an interesting time ; through 
 what Charles Reade called (in his biggest capitals) 
 This Gigantic Age. To get at the atmosphere 
 of any period, the one and only way is to collect 
 the impressions of those who breathed it : and 
 so here are mine." 
 
 But, as no two pairs of eyes see alike, and as 
 all of us use some sort of glasses with lenses 
 ground and tinted by all manner of optical in- 
 fluences — inherited or original bias, education, 
 character, environment, temperament, bodily 
 and mental health, with all the thousand and one 
 other circumstances that distinguish man from 
 man and woman from woman — such observations 
 are of little or no value unless we know some- 
 thing about the eyesight, and a great deal about 
 the spectacles, of the observer. He may be 
 2 
 
Introduction 
 
 near-sighted or long-sighted in his outlook : his 
 vision may be wide or narrow in its range. His 
 glasses may be of the magnifying, or of the 
 diminishing, or of the distorting order : they may 
 be rose-pink, or smoky, or grey, or green. So 
 this same typical Nobody of ours must duly 
 preface his " So here are mine " with " So here 
 am I." " Know thyself" may be a counsel of 
 perfection, but one must be singularly stupid if 
 one does not get a good way towards it by a 
 good way short of seventy years. 
 
 Mine, then, are the eyes, the spectacles, and 
 the point of view of a mid-Victorian who has not 
 cared to move with the times : who dislikes all 
 change, and is hard to convince that any given 
 case of it can be for the better : who, without 
 being by any means an indiscriminate praiser of 
 the past, fails to find that the world (so far as he 
 knows it) is either wiser, or happier, or nearer 
 Heaven than, say, fifty years ago, or, maybe, 
 many more — and what else really matters ? 
 Towards all the characteristic and paramount 
 interests of my present contemporaries — natural 
 science, machinery, sport, games, and advertise- 
 ment — I am in the position of an outer barbarian. 
 My blank ignorance of each and all is of the 
 hopeless sort that comes from lack of the least 
 desire for knowledge. This is no boast : I fully 
 
 3 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 agree that " Soyez de votre siecle " is the acme of 
 practical wisdom, that everybody ought to know 
 everything, and sympathy to be universal. I 
 merely wish to add a very necessary item to the 
 long list of my limitations, so that any reader who 
 cares to assist at my exercise of memory may the 
 better estimate what sort of spectacles he will 
 have to assume. I will not even promise that 
 the glasses shall never be without a blur. I have 
 never kept a diary, or made notes of happenings, 
 and have preserved but few letters — or rather the 
 accidents and chances of an untidy workshop 
 have spared but few. The result will, I therefore 
 expect, be rather the impression of an atmosphere 
 as experienced by one to whom it is still the 
 breath of life as no fresher air can be ; by one of 
 the diminishing few who, though the twentieth 
 century is in its teens, are mid-Victorians still. 
 
 My first inhalation preceded Edward VI I. 's by 
 rather more than seven months, being on the 25th 
 of March, 184 1 ; my lease of life thus appropriately 
 dating from a recognised quarter-day. It occurred 
 in Berkeley Street, in the city of Gloucester, at 
 one of two houses on the west side afterwards 
 united, and occupied together as the Stamp 
 Office. Berkeley Street was, at any rate within 
 a year ago, a narrow by-way of presumably 
 early Georgian architecture, such as is passed 
 
 4 
 
First Impressions 
 
 or traversed without any particular notice in 
 almost any town old enough to possess it. It 
 started southward from hard by the Shire Hall 
 in Westgate Street, which one had but to cross 
 in order to find entrance into the College Green, 
 with its almost too sudden and close a revelation 
 of what I wish I could claim as the first of my 
 Reminiscences in time as well as in permanent 
 supremacy — the Cathedral. I ought to be able 
 to begin them with what ought to have been 
 the first impression of one of the noblest of 
 English Cathedrals upon a child born almost 
 under its tower. I am however bound to confess 
 that the child in question was not affected in this 
 matter by any impression sufficiently conscious to 
 harden into a memory. No doubt I was too familiar 
 from the earliest moment possible with the sight 
 of my majestic neighbour to bestow on it more 
 attention than on anything else that is a part of 
 one's days from their beginning. My very 
 earliest reminiscence is of much too common- 
 place a kind to have been an afterthought or 
 an imagination from hearsay, as the reported 
 recollections of infancy so frequently are. It is 
 merely of being held in a nursemaid's arms at 
 a window and seeing some pigeons in a yard ; 
 and it is still as distinct as if I had nothing else 
 to remember. I record it for the sake of its 
 
 5 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 bearing upon the earliest possible dawning of 
 conscious memory, for it is certain, from circum- 
 stantial details, that I could not have been more 
 than twelve months old. But I cannot altogether 
 accept as conclusive my younger brother's im- 
 pression, however vivid, that, at less than sixteen 
 months old — he could not have been more — he 
 saw a man hanged. I do not mean that so 
 gruesome a first experience of life was probably 
 but an antedated dream. A certain back room 
 on the top floor of the house in Berkeley Street 
 commanded a view of the county gaol, with its 
 stage for the public and popular entertainment 
 known as the Last Penalty of the Law. On such 
 occasions, our mother used to lock the door of the 
 room and remove the key. Now of course It 
 may be that, despite precautions, one of the 
 maids, inspired by curiosity, may have gained 
 access to the room, and had no scruple in holding 
 up to share the sight a child whom she might 
 justly think too young to make head or tail of 
 what he might not even observe. At any rate, 
 an actual man was actually hanged in public at 
 the date to which my brother's memory refers. 
 But then the potential spectacle of Capital 
 Punishment from one window, unlike that of a 
 few pigeons from another, would be a matter of 
 after-talk ; and the effect of even a chance word 
 6 
 
A Disciple of Dogberry 
 
 on such a topic upon the sensitive imagination 
 of a child old enough to catch it up is easy to 
 suppose. 
 
 My own subsequent recollections up to my sixth 
 birthday, whence they start unbroken, are of the 
 character of occasional flashes, with long lapses 
 into forgetfulness between. To the passages of 
 oblivion belongs my inability, or indeed anybody 
 else's, to remember when I could not read. For 
 that matter, I must confess myself strongly dis- 
 posed to agree with Dogberry that reading, 
 however it may be with writing, comes by nature. 
 I doubt if reading, when consciously learned, ever 
 becomes quite the real thing : the real thing, 
 where books are concerned, being a matter rather 
 of instinct than of reason, of love than of know- 
 ledge, of heart than of brain. The fewness of 
 those who will be able to make head or tail of 
 what I can possibly mean, now that something 
 called Reading has been made virtually universal, 
 emphasises, I consider, the soundness of Dog- 
 berry's contention and mine. As I am trying, 
 however, to write for as many readers as I can, 
 I will recur at once to such occasional flashes of 
 recollection as convince the most sceptical of us 
 that we, even we our own very selves, are the 
 selfsame persons who were once upon a time 
 less than six years old. This will be the easier, 
 
 7 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 as they are both vivid and few. There were the 
 two girls, quite big girls, who blew kisses to my 
 brother and myself from an opposite window — 
 whether we returned them or not I cannot recall. 
 A much more interesting experience than any 
 flirtation, however one-sided, I found after our 
 removal from dark and narrow Berkeley Street 
 to a gardened house in the suburban parish of 
 Kingsholm St. Mary. This was my sole right 
 and title to the ownership of a brown owl, 
 Jacob by name, who at first lived in the corner 
 of a cellar, but was afterwards more suitably 
 lodged in an ivy-mantled shed in the garden. I 
 was fascinated by his ceaseless blink, but I don't 
 think that our intercourse ever got farther than 
 his blink and my stare. Did anybody, I wonder, 
 ever get further with an owl ? I have always, 
 however, taken a sort of sympathetic interest in 
 the mysterious race of Jacob. It was he, I have 
 little doubt, who indirectly and long afterwards 
 became answerable for a certain " Tale from 
 Blackwood " entided " A Story of Eulenburg." 
 What became of Jacob is among his obscurities. 
 Then there was my first visit to a place of worship 
 — the Unitarian chapel which my mother, whose 
 family was of that denomination, attended — 
 where I distinguished myself by suddenly setting 
 up a loud wail in the middle, I think, of the 
 
Confusion of Persons 
 
 sermon, and proclaiming to the congregation 
 that my foot had gone to sleep. What I most 
 likely said was not "my," but "your" foot; for 
 instead of "I," "me," and "my," it was my 
 way at that period to say "you" and "your" 
 — a confusion of persons without division of 
 substance apt to cause misunderstandings. There 
 was a detestable superstition in those days, 
 now happily extinct, that the supremely honour- 
 able titles of "Father" and "Mother" were 
 "unofenteel" — that was the odious term. So 
 " Merriman," I remember saying to the man who 
 did the garden work, " Papa says you are a very 
 lazy gardener " — whereas it was of my own 
 delinquency, or at any rate of the grievance of 
 being charged with it, that I wanted to make 
 frank confession to friendly ears. "That /am a 
 very lazy gardener " was what I meant him to 
 understand ; and Merriman's complaint to my 
 father of an unjust accusation behind his back 
 was not, I believe, wholly satisfied by an 
 attempted explanation of my peculiar and, so 
 far as I know, entirely original views of meta- 
 physical grammar. My skin was uncomfortably 
 thin in those days — indeed I doubt its having 
 properly thickened, even in these ; and I dis- 
 tinctly remember something far beyond a mere 
 misunderstanding — a downright violent quarrel 
 
 9 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 that came to blows. My opponent was nothing 
 less formidable than my own shadow. I had 
 been presented with one of those brooms made of 
 shavings that used to be hawked about by wan- 
 dering women from Germany or the Netherlands 
 to one invariable tune : 
 
 Ach lieber Augustin, 
 Augustin, Augustin, 
 Ach lieber Augustin, 
 Alles ist wag, 
 
 ran, as I learned later, the invariable words. The 
 " Buy-a-Broom" woman deserves a niche in the 
 reminiscences of all who can remember her, for 
 her cuckoo-like arrival with the spring from 
 apparently nowhere was among the few pic- 
 turesque features of an essentially unpicturesque 
 period ; and she has long been as extinct as her 
 wares. I doubt if a specimen of these is to be 
 found even in the most exhaustively miscellaneous 
 collection of samplers, warming-pans, snufters, 
 smock-frocks, and such-like common objects of 
 her time. I am at any rate quite sure that no 
 less fit for an archaeological museum would be a 
 child who, with all modern toy-land and book- 
 land for his pasture, could be made happy with a 
 broom of shavings, or a sixth perusal of" Even- 
 ings at Home." I was qualifying for the museum 
 by sweeping the parlour carpet with the industry 
 10 
 
Fighting with Shadows 
 
 that I had evidently not spent upon the garden. 
 It was by candle-light, and I was presently aware 
 of another person, close against the wall, occupied 
 in the same way. He amused me for a while, 
 but his persistence in imitating my every move- 
 ment seemed at last like deliberate mockery. 
 I tried to baffle him by sudden attitudes and 
 antics such as I fancied he must fail to follow, but 
 in vain. Finally, irritated beyond endurance, I 
 went for him, first with broom and then with 
 fists ; and so, when my knuckles met the wall, 
 learned how fighting with shadows mostly ends. 
 
 The last of these very early recollections that I 
 shall record is of a different order. In a country 
 lane with my father and mother, we met a stately- 
 looking old gentleman who, by something pecu- 
 liar about his dress, and a great deal about his 
 bearing, impressed me, even at my then age, as 
 Somebody. He stopped to talk, and at the end 
 of the talk laid a hand upon my head and solemnly 
 blessed me. It was James Henry Monk, Bishop 
 of Gloucester, one of the last of the prelates who 
 owed their mitres to their Greek — a race for 
 whom more and better is to be said than is 
 fashionable, now that a Bishop, instead of being 
 the fixed centre of his diocese, is expected to be 
 always here, there, and everywhere at once : not 
 only the centre, but every point in the circum- 
 
 II 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 ference and in the area as well. I wish I had 
 been old or extravagantly precocious enough to 
 appreciate such a moment of intimacy between 
 myself and the author of the Life of Bentley : 
 that most entertaining of classics, which further- 
 more brought forth one of the ablest of De 
 Quincey's biographical reviews. At any rate, this 
 is no mere second-hand reminiscence adopted 
 from hearsay. Though the figure of the Bishop 
 is somewhat hazy, it is inseparable from the clear 
 recollection of the profusion of convolvulus 
 blossom among the hedges along the lane. 
 
 12 
 
CHAPTER 11 
 
 Gloucester in the 'Forties — Queen Square, Bloomsbury- 
 Playgoer and Critic — A Kiss from the Past 
 
 The Gloucester that I remember is scarcely 
 recognisable as the same Gloucester that I still 
 occasionally see. What is now little else than 
 a big railway station, with its attendant factories, 
 its tram-laid thoroughfares, and a bustling popula- 
 tion of nearly fifty thousand, where the very 
 Cathedral, though, of course, "restored," has the 
 air of an anachronism, was, as I can remember, 
 a quiet, not to say dull, county town, inhabited 
 by some fourteen thousand folk according to the 
 census in which I was just in time to get counted. 
 As to its place in the railway system, I believe 
 that not till some while later did the Great 
 Western line reach from Paddington in that 
 direction farther than Cirencester, whence a 
 stage coach completed the route. Indeed I 
 have something like a personal remembrance 
 of such a journey : but am not sure. It is just 
 the sort of experience that one is told of, vividly 
 
 13 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 realised, and thenceforth adopted, with continually 
 growing certainty, as one's very own. The only 
 industry of any importance represented the historic 
 repute of Gloucester for the manufacture of pins. 
 The City walls that so stoutly resisted King 
 Charles I. as to decide the event of the Great 
 Rebellion were scarcely traceable except here 
 and there ; the ancient Cross had left its name 
 alone to the starting-point of the four main 
 streets, Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate, and 
 Westgate ; and the Gates also nothing but their 
 names. But what with the Cathedral and its 
 precincts ; the five old parish churches within 
 so small a space — they were eleven, it is said, 
 before the siege — the old grammar schools and 
 other foundations, the old inns and taverns, old 
 nooks and by-ways, all running over with almost 
 visible history, and steeped in an atmosphere of 
 yet older and older worlds, the ancient British 
 City of Caerloew between the Severn and the 
 Cotswolds was as good a gateway into larger 
 life as anybody with a grain of imagination in 
 him could desire — then. 
 
 Thus far, the scene of my first memories 
 conforms pretty closely to the general character 
 of the Cathedral cities of those days, and still, 
 to some diminishing extent, of these, in cases 
 of slower and gentler transformation. No two 
 
 14 
 
Gloucester in the 'Forties 
 
 were essentially alike : history, tradition, natural 
 and other local influences prevented that, and 
 gave to each a strongly marked personality of 
 its own. My impression is that the Genius loci 
 of the city where Hooper was burned and White- 
 field born and bred was still of the Puritan sort 
 that had turned the tide against King Charles. 
 Nonconformity abounded : the Quaker dress was 
 too agreeably familiar for notice — who, remem- 
 bering it, fails to regret the weak-kneed deference 
 to worldly fashion that has let it go ? But the 
 predominance of Deans and Chapters, the re- 
 semblance of one ancient corporation to another, 
 the persistent appearance of the same surnames 
 in the same set of civic annals, the same mode 
 of life, and the same general impression of com- 
 fortable and respectable leisure, created a common 
 type out of any amount of individual variety. 
 Gloucester, however, though farther from the 
 sea than is London Bridge from the Nore, shared 
 with London the otherwise unique peculiarity 
 of being at once a seaport and an inland town : 
 thus, in one notable respect, departing from the 
 Cathedral City type, to which it none the less 
 definitely belonged. The tidal and navigable 
 Severn had stamped it with this distinctive 
 feature before its recorded history begins : and, 
 many years before the outset of mine, the nearly 
 
 15 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 parallel Canal from Sharpness led into the Basin 
 where ships of many nations — French, Italian, 
 Russian, conspicuously the last — unloaded their 
 cargoes, mainly of corn. The corn-merchants 
 constituted a kind of hatcte bourgeoisie. The con- 
 siderable trade with Russia virtually vanished 
 at the outbreak of the Crimean War : the 
 development of Sharpness as a more convenient 
 and accessible port at the entrance of the Canal 
 has helped to turn the Gloucester of then into 
 the mere big railway station, with appendages, 
 of now. But long before these public happenings 
 I had paid many a visit to the Basin in the 
 companionship of my Uncle Tom, who was not 
 only the harbour-master but a naval lieutenant 
 with a medal for service in the American war 
 of 1813-15, of which I was exceedingly proud. 
 Nor was my wondering interest in the ships 
 with mysterious foreign names, and their out- 
 landish crews, degraded into prose by explanatory 
 lectures ; for Uncle Tom was the most silent 
 of men. As a mathematician he had solved 
 problems, and as a fine swimmer he had saved 
 lives : but he never told. I do not think that 
 the foreign sailors were popular. The French 
 sailors, in particular, were accused of the abomina- 
 tion, to the homely wits of the then homekeeping 
 British mind, of eating snails. They had been 
 
 x6 
 
Gloucester in the 'Forties 
 
 actually seen gathering those creatures in sacks, 
 at early morning. The accusation was doubtless 
 true : and I hope they had the occasional luck 
 to meet with some of the grand white snails 
 ancestrally imported by the Roman grandees, 
 and still plentiful among the many remains of 
 baths and villas not far away. 
 
 I have casually spoken of Gloucester in the 
 'forties as dull, but that is only from the present 
 point of view. There is no reason for assuming 
 that it found itself so. Twice or thrice a year the 
 Judges of Assize were met in state at Over Bridge 
 on their way from Monmouth by the High Sheriff 
 of the County, and conducted into the City by an 
 escort of mounted trumpeters and javelin men. 
 The Oxford Circuit ended there : so what with 
 barristers, attorneys, witnesses, jurymen, plaintiffs, 
 defendants, and so forth, innkeepers at any rate, 
 and citizens with lodgings to let, had anything 
 but a dull time. Then every third year Glou- 
 cester took its turn in the Festival of the Three 
 Choirs, now among the chief annual events of 
 the musical world at large, and already of high 
 local prestige and fashion, bringing the carriages, 
 toilettes, and purses of the County people into 
 the County town — Worcester, Hereford, or Glou- 
 cester as the turn might be. Of this, my own 
 earlier memories have nothing to say. They 
 c 17 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 are, however, busy enough with the vanished or 
 vanishing excitements that came in my way. 
 There was May Day, for example, when the 
 chimney sweeps, three of the party grotesquely 
 got up as Jack-in-the-Green (a moving mass of 
 foliage), Maid Marian, and Clown, danced about 
 the streets to a pan-pipe and tambourine, the 
 latter serving also for more or less voluntary 
 contributions. There was Whit-Monday, when 
 the Friendly Societies marched in solemn pro- 
 cession with banners and scarves. But, chief 
 among all the glories of the year, was Michaelmas- 
 tide, for it brought Barton Fair. 
 
 I do not know its history : it was in all likeli- 
 hood originally held just without the old East 
 Gate, but its legal limits had come to include a 
 considerable portion of one of the main streets 
 of the city. What this meant in the years that 
 I am recalling may be judged from its being for 
 pleasure as well as for business, with a " Mop " 
 for hiring farm servants to follow, and that 
 among the privileges of the inhabitants of its 
 limits was that of selling beer without a licence 
 during the continuance of the Fair. The privi- 
 lege was exercised freely, those who took the 
 benefit of it hanging out a bush for a sign. 
 Whether the proverb referring to the custom 
 referred also to the excellence of the liquor sold 
 i8 
 
Barton Fair 
 
 may be open to question. The hiring of a farm 
 servant was for the twelve months following the 
 fair : to many such, Barton Fair was the solitary 
 dissipation of the year, and a man who had drunk 
 nothing better than rough, muddy cider since last 
 " Mop" was not likely to be particular as to the 
 quality of his ale. I believe that, in fact. 
 Barton Fair, old style, was very much of an 
 orgie, where, while the need for a licence, with 
 a C, was suspended, a good deal of license, with 
 an S, was allowed. None the less, beyond any 
 question there was plenty of at any rate out- 
 wardly harmless if bewilderingly boisterous enter- 
 tainment in being taken for a stroll through 
 the fair during the — comparatively — sober part 
 of the day. The stentorian patter of the cheap- 
 jacks, the banging of big drums emphasising the 
 vociferations of rival showmen, the cracking of 
 whips, and the startling thud when some marks- 
 man won a handful of nuts for his sweetheart by 
 accidentally scoring a bull's eye from a gun-barrel 
 calculated to miss the more widely the better it 
 was aimed — all these blended with the voices of 
 the crowd in a feast for the ear. The smock-frock 
 was still the common costume of country folk, 
 who would have helped Hogarth to many a group 
 by hanging sheepishly round the roulette tables, 
 or more recklessly defying fortune by swaggering 
 
 19 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 about with ribbons streaming from their hats, to 
 show that they had taken, and evidently spent, 
 the Queen's shilHng ; for the recruiting sergeant 
 was well to the fore. The same pencil would 
 assuredly — though I am not an eye-witness on 
 this point — have found thoroughly congenial 
 subjects in the interiors of the booths devoted to 
 the consumption of roast pork and roast goose, 
 the special menu of the occasion. Among the 
 equally indispensable adjuncts of the festival were 
 the stalls for the sale of " Parliament " : un- 
 accountably named pieces of gingerbread in 
 conventionalised shapes of birds, beasts, or fishes, 
 and partially gilded. So another proverbial 
 expression, " to take the gilt off the ginger- 
 bread," was visibly explained. I never saw the 
 inevitable fat lady or calf with too many legs — 
 indeed, nothing would have induced me to see 
 them, for the mere thought of any deformity, 
 much more of monstrosity, used to give me actual 
 nausea. Had some untrustworthy guardian taken 
 me into such a show, I should have kept my eyes 
 tight shut till I came out again. There was 
 another thing, too, which I did not like, but could 
 not avoid. I had a most uncomfortably sensitive 
 sense of smell, and the innumerable ropes ot 
 onions, apparently monopolising the commerce ot 
 the fair, and never out of sight and scent, added 
 20 
 
Sights of Barton Fair 
 
 pungency to an atmosphere quite strongly enough 
 flavoured without them. 
 
 But there is one personage whom Barton Fair 
 enables me to add to my recollections without 
 any drawback, and of whom I wish my age 
 at the time under remembrance could have 
 enabled me to add more. He was the strolling 
 player : not the regularly engaged and salaried 
 lady or gentleman ("He" does not exclude 
 " She ") of the organised tour, but the still 
 extant stroller who might have stepped straight 
 out of one of Goldsmith's pages. I do wish 
 that I had been old enough to make his acquaint- 
 ance before it was too late. It is something, 
 however, to have seen him, and her, act in a 
 booth at a fair. Perhaps somebody better versed 
 than I in the history of the stage will inform 
 me of the plot and title of the particular drama 
 now in my mind. It could not, as I remember 
 the rapidity of the preliminary business, have 
 lasted many minutes, so that the three unities 
 of time, place, and action must have been 
 extra-scrupulously observed. The great scene 
 was a terrible single combat, at any rate a 
 frantic clashing of swords, between two pre- 
 sumable rivals for the love of a decidedly elderly 
 lady who looked on at the duel dressed in what 
 looked like a not over-clean nightgown and 
 
 21 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 with dishevelled hair. The effect, however, was 
 somewhat damaged, and the denouement antici- 
 pated. The front bench on which the elite of 
 the audience (including myself) sat, suddenly- 
 collapsed, and left us sprawling. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that my 
 earlier outlook was wholly confined by the 
 boundaries of my native city, or that my only 
 notion of the drama was derived from a booth 
 at a fair. My mother's parents, with one of her 
 brothers and three of her sisters (she was the 
 eldest of twelve, the others being married and 
 scattered), lived in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, 
 which at that time, though its fashion was of 
 the past, was a highly respectable — what its 
 early Victorian inhabitants no doubt termed 
 " genteel " — abode for prosperous lawyers and 
 other professional men. Its spacious rooms and 
 broad staircases with polished floors, and its not 
 being on the way to anywhere, gave it a character 
 of quiet dignity in keeping with its denizens. 
 One entire end of the square was occupied by the 
 bigf house of the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Frederick 
 Pollock ; it had need to be big, if his nineteen 
 living sons and daughters were ever there 
 together. My grandfather, a kindly old gentle- 
 man who had spent his 'teens in the Navy, held 
 22 
 
Queen Square, Bloomsbury 
 
 one of the afterwards abolished and pensioned- 
 off offices of the Court of Chancery ; its duties, 
 so far as I could make out, consisted in luncheon, 
 reading the Times^ and taking snuff, from some 
 time later than ten to some time earlier than 
 four. A next-door neighbour and acquaintance 
 was a solicitor in large practice : and these three 
 may be taken as typical representatives of the 
 Square, presided over, at the centre of its railed 
 and unfrequented garden, by a weather-beaten 
 and peculiarly ugly statue of Queen Anne. I 
 used to be sometimes sent to play in the garden 
 with nobody but Queen Anne for company ; and 
 what she and I could possibly find to play at 
 all by ourselves I can neither remember nor 
 imagine, I suppose she is still there ; I would 
 go and see, if it were not that places with 
 memories are best avoided. All the life is 
 frozen out of them by the slightest change. No 
 doubt I should find the church in the corner 
 which I regarded with respectful interest, inas- 
 much as my parents had been married there. 
 The story went that, as the church was no more 
 than ten doors distant from the bride's home, 
 her carriage, in order to maintain the full prestige 
 and dignity of such an occasion, reached it by 
 making twice the round of the Square, and this 
 in a fall of snow. The only house out of keeping 
 
 23 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 with the spirit of the place was one tenanted 
 by some Sisters of Mercy, exciting in me a 
 curiosity that nobody seemed willing to satisfy. 
 Perhaps nobody was able. I think they were 
 regarded as undesirable aliens : a blot upon the 
 otherwise immaculate respectability of the Square. 
 Not all, however, of my early memories of life 
 in London are cased in the almost prae- Victorian 
 mahogany round which Bloomsbury used to dine 
 at five. They include the Lyceum of Madame 
 Vestris and Charles Mathews : truly a stride 
 of seven-leagued boots from where I left myself 
 sprawling in the booth at Barton Fair. Of 
 Mathews, on that first occasion, or of the parts 
 he played, I can recall nothing definite but a 
 flow of words too fast to follow : of Vestris, in 
 the extravaganza of " The Seven Champions of 
 Christendom," only a glorified vision. But I 
 knew all about the Champions of Christendom 
 from another source : and, in spite of the excite- 
 ment, and the vision, and the scenic splendour, 
 I know that I was a good deal put out by what 
 seemed to me the unpardonably ignorant liberties 
 taken with the familiar legend. I never passed 
 through the stage-struck phase : not even my 
 first pantomime inspired me with a minute's 
 wish to be a Clown ; and in matters dramatic 
 I have always been deplorably hard to please — 
 24 
 
Playgoer and Critic 
 
 even when constrained to admit an unsurpassable 
 best, I have nearly always wanted something 
 more and better. Yet I think my first experience 
 as playgoer and critic to be not uncommon. Were 
 I to dramatise a legend or fairy tale I would 
 stick as tight and close to the received text as 
 if I myself were still a child — a real child, that is 
 to say, to whom the cleverest up-to-date adapta- 
 tions, however splendidly produced, are without 
 the soul of the stories which, having read or heard, 
 he wants to see exactly as they were read or 
 heard — nothing left out, nothing needlessly put in. 
 If I record so trite and inevitable a recollection 
 as a visit to Madame Tussaud's, then lodged 
 in Baker Street in almost homely style, it is 
 for a special reason. I had been taken there 
 by one of my aunts, and as we were going out 
 a little old lady in black, standing at the door 
 of the gallery, stooped down and kissed me. 
 It was Madame Tussaud herself: the original 
 Madame, who had known and modelled Voltaire, 
 who was born in 1694. That kiss therefore sets 
 but a single life between myself and one who 
 was born 219 years ago. Only nine years more 
 would as closely have linked me with the reign 
 of King James II., the Revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes, and the consequent emigration of my 
 Huguenot ancestors from the banks of the Rhone. 
 
 25 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 My father and his brothers — Serjeant Talfourd — Edward 
 Lear — Origin of " The Book of Nonsense " — His celibacy 
 
 James Francillon, my father, born in 1802, was 
 the son of an officer in the Navy who died, on 
 service, at Lisbon in or about i8i8, and the 
 youngest of six brothers. The eldest of these, 
 Francis — our eldest sons are always christened 
 Francis, and sometimes all the other sons as 
 well — was quite recently, and perhaps is still, 
 remembered at Banbury, where he settled and 
 practised, as an able solicitor with a talent for 
 advocacy, who, out of sheer animal spirits, defied 
 ordinary professional convenances with a zest that 
 acquired for him the privilege of having his 
 eccentricities taken for granted, as in the natural 
 order of things. He was, in fact, a strongly 
 developed specimen of what in the time of Queen 
 Anne (herself, not her statue) was known as a 
 " humorist " : one who follows his own humours, 
 without caring a straw what may be thought of 
 him or them. That he of all men had married 
 a strict, old-fashioned Quakeress is almost as 
 26 
 
My Father and his Brothers 
 
 humoursome a meeting of extremes as that such 
 a Quakeress, of all women, had married him. 
 He was the author of a treatise on Punctuation, 
 based on a theory, more original and ingenious 
 than practically useful, of his own. I never saw 
 much of " Uncle Frank." My most vivid por- 
 trait of him is taken from a later chapter of my 
 reminiscences than the present, when we walked 
 together along the High Street of Oxford, I in 
 wig and gown, he in his habitual substitute for a 
 great-coat — a primitive sort of poncho, contrived 
 by roughly cutting a head-hole in the middle of 
 an old horse-cloth of conspicuous pattern and 
 colours. The four brothers between the eldest and 
 youngest all belonged to the Navy. Uncle Tom 
 I have already mentioned. Uncle John, with the 
 title of Commander, was, in my time, in business 
 at Gloucester as a shipbroker. Neither was 
 married. My uncles Charles and Philip were before 
 my time. The former had died in Newfound- 
 land; the latter had been drowned by the capsizing 
 of a boat in Portsmouth Harbour. Yet, though 
 thus both my grandfathers and four of my five 
 paternal uncles were sailors, and ships among my 
 earliest memories, I never for a moment felt any 
 more inclination for the sea than for the stage. 
 
 My father was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn, 
 and obtained considerable business on the Oxford 
 
 27 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Circuit, occupying chambers in Southampton 
 Buildings off Chancery Lane during Term, and 
 practising locally at other times. His speciality, 
 unusual and therefore advantageous at the Com- 
 mon Law Bar, was the Law of Real Property : 
 and he has a place in the Dictionary of National 
 Biography as the author of " Lectures Elementary 
 and Familiar on English Law." He was among 
 the first-appointed County Court Judges, and 
 soon afterwards removed from Gloucester to 
 Cheltenham ; a change of surroundings which, 
 to myself at least, was like going into another, 
 but I cannot add better, world. For, transformed 
 as it is, I still retain a native affection for the 
 ancient and historic City of the Cathedral and 
 the Severn : none for the fine and fashionable 
 upstart eight miles away, though my home was 
 there for some eighteen years. I was ^the one, 
 never more than at the other. 
 
 Assize time would sometimes bring a Circuit 
 friend of my father's over those eight miles to 
 dinner. The visit of one of these I especially 
 remember. I can see him now, as he stood on 
 the hearthrug, punchy and red-faced ; but his 
 voice has faded away, though I remember voices 
 better than faces as a rule. This was Serjeant, 
 almost immediately afterwards Mr. Justice, Tal- 
 fourd, then leader of the Oxford Circuit ; the 
 28 
 
Serjeant Talfourd 
 
 friend, executor, and biographer of Charles Lamb 
 — the only instance I can think of in anything like 
 modern times of the alliance of legal and literary 
 reputation without injury to either. Clients 
 are naturally mistrustful of counsel who have 
 other mistresses than their profession ; but 
 probably Talfourd never missed a brief by 
 reason of his notorious addiction to the tragic 
 muse. I do not think I had ever heard of 
 Lamb. But I had read " Ion," " The Athenian 
 Captive," and " Glencoe " — and here, before me 
 on the hearthrug, was the man who had written 
 them. The successful performance, or rather 
 the performance at all, of these graceful declama- 
 tions in blank verse is inconceivable in these 
 days ; but it was both possible and actual in 
 those of Macready. I think, by the way, that 
 "Glencoe" was in prose; but am not sure, as I 
 have never seen it since I saw its author. I 
 wonder if I am the sole surviving reader of the 
 tragedies of Thomas Noon Talfourd. I should 
 not be surprised if I were. Not for these will 
 he be remembered by others, but as the friend 
 of Lamb, for his parliamentary championship of 
 the rights of authors, and for his sudden death 
 on the bench at Stafford while, in the course of 
 his charge to the Grand Jury, pleading for a 
 closer sympathy between the rich and the poor. 
 
 29 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 My second author was of a very different 
 order. I am certainly not alone in aff*ectionate 
 memories of Edward Lear, When quite a young 
 man, living in London as young men without 
 means or any prospects better than Alnaschar's 
 do manage to live, he was introduced into my 
 mother's home circle by her brother Robert, then 
 studying art — my only near relation neither sailor 
 nor lawyer— under (I think) Hulmandel. He at 
 once became an ever welcome visitor : an almost 
 brotherly and sisterly relation grew up between 
 him and the group of bright young girls who then 
 filled with life the house in Queen Square. It 
 was on one of my visits there that I met him for 
 the first time. Marriages, two of them entailing 
 emigration to an island in then distant and remote 
 Ontario, had thinned the group by that time, and 
 the years had not passed over those who were 
 left without a sign. But such changes as these 
 were not of the sort that affected Lear. One has 
 heard a great deal of late about " genius for 
 friendship." The rather worn-out phrase might 
 well have been invented, in its original freshness, 
 for him. Of his ever-increasing multitude of 
 friends I do not believe that he ever lost one 
 except by death ; a new friendship never lessened 
 an old one ; and it is impossible to imagine his 
 having ever made an enemy. His corre- 
 30 
 
Edward Lear 
 
 spondence came to be immense — he had at last 
 to settle a scheme for its restriction, lest it should 
 absorb the whole of his time. Whether he kept 
 to such a scheme is more than doubtful. How- 
 ever that may be, he never ceased to write at 
 frequent intervals to my mother so long as both 
 were alive — long and intimate letters, free from 
 the by no means brilliant jocularity of comic 
 spelling which makes his published letters to 
 Chichester Fortescue such wearisome reading. 
 Only an occasional grotesquely coined poly- 
 syllable gave the Learian cachet to really amusing 
 and interesting accounts of what he was doing 
 or planning. They were a pleasure to us all. 
 Alas, that such would-have-been valuable con- 
 tributions to my reminiscences should have dis- 
 appeared — I cannot think inadvertently, much 
 less intentionally, destroyed. 
 
 Lear's love of children, and his immediate 
 attraction for them, was of the essence of his 
 charm. That first meeting of mine with him is 
 memorable inasmuch as, while talking to my 
 aunts, he amused himself for my benefit by 
 making a pen-and-ink drawing of an Eastern 
 landscape, with camels and palms. I did not 
 listen to the talk : I was wholly absorbed in 
 following the strokes of the pen. I treasured it 
 as long as the wear and tear of nurseries and 
 
 31 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 schoolrooms allowed. Much more interesting, 
 however — indeed they may take rank as pieces of 
 Hterafy history — were Lear's occasional visits to 
 us at Cheltenham ; for we children, my brother, 
 my sister, and myself, were delighted eye- 
 witnesses of the production of some of the earliest 
 pages of the first "Book of Nonsense;" both 
 pictures (so to call them) and rhymes. The 
 current tradition is that these were dashed off for 
 the children of the fourteenth Earl of Derby. 
 No doubt many of them were, for Lear numbered 
 at least three successive earls among his patrons 
 — which in his case invariably meant his attached 
 friends ; and his first commission, as an animal 
 painter, had come from Knowsley. But equally 
 without doubt many other children had their part 
 in the fun ; and I can answer for the very con- 
 siderable part accorded to us three. We possessed 
 a good share of the original drawings, made 
 while we stood by the artist's knee, and their 
 attendant "Limericks" were household words, 
 long before there was any thought of their collec- 
 tion and publication. Alas, again ! When the 
 general collection came to be made, our particular 
 one was added to it, and, translated into print, 
 was no longer our very own, that we had watched 
 flow for us from the pen. Apropos of the 
 connection of the House of Stanley with the 
 32 
 
Origin of '' Book of Nonsense " 
 
 ** Book of Nonsense," Lear used to tell how, soon 
 after its publication, he was travelling in a railway- 
 carriage opposite a family party engaged in 
 enjoying its fun. The father proceeded to 
 explain to the children that its actual author was 
 the Earl of Derby himself, under the pen-name 
 of Edward Lear : a very slight disguise of 
 "Edward, Earl," "Lear" being of course an 
 obvious anagram of " Earl." The veritable 
 author's assurance that not only was Edward 
 Lear the real name of a real person, but that he 
 himself knew him well, had no effect beyond pro- 
 voking a little temper. " I have it on the very 
 best authority," was the unanswerable retort to 
 all he could say. Even when he produced a 
 visiting card, and declared himself to be the man, it 
 was evidently to be regarded as either a lunatic or 
 an impostor. Considering the popular preference 
 of fable, the wilder the better, to fact, it is really 
 surprising that so first-class a myth as the identity 
 of the Rupert of Debate with Derry-down-Derry 
 should have failed to fix itself ineradicably in the 
 public mind. 
 
 Lear's friendship was an inheritance from 
 generation to generation ; and after I came to 
 London in 1863, never again to leave it, I seldom 
 missed seeing him on any of his visits there. It 
 was on his last visit that I saw him for the last 
 D 33 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 time. My mature impression of him is that he 
 was, in spite of any superficial evidence to the 
 contrary, a melancholy man, weighed down by 
 a sense of solitude. His innumerable friendships 
 were, I think, too much in the nature of a crowd : 
 and there is no such loneliness as is to be found 
 in a crowd. His gentle and affectionate nature 
 needed marriage, especially if it should give him 
 children of his own instead of all the world's. 
 But to this there was the oddest of all odd 
 obstacles. He had an ingrained conviction that 
 he was too ugly for any woman to accept him. 
 No doubt he was ugly. His impressionistic 
 self-portraiture on the first page of the " Book of 
 Nonsense" as the " Old Derry-down-Derry, Who 
 loved to see little folks merry," is scarcely a 
 caricature : and his plainness of face was made 
 the more emphatic by his nearness of sight, 
 awkward slouch, and a style of dress which can 
 only be called careless by courtesy. He may 
 have thought that dress was no concern of one 
 for whom it could do nothing. But though, 
 as a true humorist, he could make himself his 
 own butt, that perverse conviction of his un- 
 questionably rankled. How absurdly, how 
 pathetically perverse it was, experiment would 
 soon have taught him : to say nothing of such 
 precedents as those of Wilkes and Mirabeau to 
 
 34 
 
Lear's Characteristics 
 
 the effect that a man may be as ugly as he 
 pleases — or doesn't please. But then Lear was 
 constitutionally shy : which is more than can be 
 said of Wilkes and Mirabeau. He would, I am 
 sure, have been a happier man could he have 
 comfortably acquiesced in destiny, like a more 
 than plain-featured but excellent friend of mine, 
 beside whom I was sitting at a smoking concert 
 when the splendidly handsome hero of a recent 
 notorious scandal came into the room. "Ah," 
 said my friend out of his abundant charity, 
 " but just think of all the temptations that beset 
 a handsome man like that ! We don't know 
 anything about them — I and you." I did not make 
 the obvious retort of " Speak for yourself, if you 
 please " : the reflection was so evidently meant, 
 in all simplicity, to help me share his satisfaction 
 in being — as he fancied — immune from the peril 
 of pleasing ladies' eyes. 
 
 But to return for a last moment to Lear. Had 
 he been a veritable Apollo to look at, I do not 
 believe that he would have been a whit different 
 from what he was — one in whom nobody who 
 knew him could imagine a deed, word, or thought 
 that was not kind, generous, unselfish, and pure. 
 I wish I did not fear that while giving so much 
 pleasure and happiness all round, he somehow 
 left himself out of the deal. 
 
 35 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Cheltenham in the 'Fifties — "The capital of India" — 
 Colonel Berkeley— Blues and Yellows — A clerical auto- 
 crat — " Speculum Episcopi " — An imperfect anagram — 
 Sons of Robert Burns — The " Prance " 
 
 Cheltenham, in the early 'fifties, was in a state 
 of transition. George III. had been its tutelary- 
 patron, and his shade still lingered. But it was 
 passing. The balls at the Assembly Rooms were 
 still presided over by a regularly appointed 
 Master of Ceremonies, supported by subscrip- 
 tions and fees ; but Colonel Kirwan was the 
 last of his line, and, it is to be feared, suffered 
 a serious falling off of the guineas of residents 
 and visitors during the latter years of his reign. 
 There were still some half-dozen Spas or Pump- 
 rooms, but their visitants had become very few 
 and very far between. Anglo-Indians were still 
 numerous ; indeed they had become so pre- 
 eminently characteristic of society there that 
 " The capital of India is Cheltenham " was a 
 boast not altogether without foundation. But 
 they no longer came for the reputed effect of the 
 
 36 
 
Anglo-Indian Cheltenham 
 
 waters upon disordered livers. They came now 
 because they found there a congenial colony 
 ready made, where they could talk and think 
 India with their fellows after what at any rate 
 used to be the manner of their kind. Few must 
 have been the residents who had not either 
 themselves been in the Company's service, or 
 had no son or brother in it or intended for it, 
 or at any rate some near Indian interest or con- 
 nection. The grass widow was a social institution, 
 and the care of children sent home from India as 
 virtual orphans was among the industries of the 
 town. The development of Cheltenham into a 
 scholastic centre was not yet, but it had begun. 
 The Ladies' " College," with its thousand or more 
 pupils from all parts of the kingdom, was un- 
 foreseen even in a dream. But the hideously 
 named " Proprietary College " for boys (the one 
 school being no more a " College" than the other) 
 had started in 1841, with the late Lord James of 
 Hereford for its first pupil, to whom only ten 
 years later it had added some four hundred 
 more. 
 
 Quite apart from the Anglo-Indian element, 
 the winter, which was the season, imported a 
 strong muster of the Berkeley Hunt — Earl Fitz- 
 hardinge's, famous as the Colonel Berkeley of 
 the annals of George IV. Collectors of causes 
 
 37 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 cdlebres will remember that he failed to satisfy the 
 House of Lords of his legitimate title to the 
 Earldom of Berkeley, in succession to his father, 
 the fifth Earl, and was compensated by a new 
 creation under a new title. Indeed such a course 
 was almost imperative, according to the notions 
 of his time, in the case of the Lord of Berkeley 
 Castle, with its great estates and its eventful 
 history. He was a great noble, and looked it, 
 and made himself felt to be one : a great Whig 
 noble, and therefore of the then most pronouncedly 
 aristocratic type and temper. His appearance 
 in Cheltenham, always in the stately solitude of 
 his postilion-driven carriage, was not rare ; but 
 he took no part in its society, or in its affairs, 
 beyond appointing its Member — for that is what 
 it came to. He was, I suppose, too great a 
 county magnate to care for or to condescend to 
 the society of a watering-place ; and, on the other 
 hand, not even an Earl's patent had caused 
 Colonel Berkeley of the Regency to change his 
 spots and his hide. His visits were mysteriously 
 spoken of, with sigh or grin as the case might be, 
 as very private affairs indeed — not that he cared 
 a straw for whatever people might say or think 
 of whatever he might do. He was not so much 
 the Lord Lieutenant of the county as its King. 
 Of his brother, the Hon. Craven Berkeley 
 
 38 
 
Blues and Yellows 
 
 (" Hon." as an unquestionably legitimate son of 
 the Earl to whose possessions his questionably 
 legitimate brother was heir — it was a family 
 history of curious complexity), who represented 
 Cheltenham through many Parliaments, my re- 
 collection is much more personal, but I cannot 
 add more interesting. My father, as having been 
 an ardent parliamentary reformer of 1832, and as 
 now one of the few Whigs of public prominence 
 in a prevalently Tory society, naturally knew 
 him well : and I remember him well as a good- 
 looking, pleasant-speaking person who took 
 good-natured notice of Me. I felt myself a 
 champion of the Right when I stood beside him 
 at a window of the George Inn, the Liberal head- 
 quarters, and watched the turmoil of polling day 
 in the High Street below. 
 
 What delicious excitements those polling days 
 were, before Ballot Acts, and Corrupt Practices 
 Acts, and so forth, deprived them of all the glory 
 of the fray! The "Yellow" band parading the 
 streets to the brass and drums of " British 
 Grenadiers": the "Blue" band to the drums 
 and brass of " Bonnets of Blue " : both, when 
 they met, competing for a triumph of sarcastic 
 noise with the taunting strains of " Oh dear, 
 what can the matter be " : the flaunting of rival 
 banners : the hourly declaration of the progress of 
 
 39 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 the poll, turning- one's heart cold with suspense as 
 each hour drew near, and then making it exult 
 or sink according as one's candidate went ahead 
 or fell behind : the universally worn rosettes of 
 orange and green, our colours, or of the odious 
 blue of the other side : the open voting, in full 
 sight and hearing of a cheering, jeering, and 
 hooting crowd : the instant assurance of victory 
 or defeat precisely at the last stroke of four, 
 thus leaving a long evening free for carousal — - 
 it was all very bad, no doubt, and often with 
 worse to follow. All the same, I like to re- 
 member wearing a rosette (though, in my present 
 opinion, of the wrong colour) through an old- 
 fashioned election : nor am I convinced that the 
 ballot-box is any security for independence, or 
 that the vote of an elector who does not sell it 
 only because nobody dares buy it, is of any more 
 political value than when the " Man in the 
 Moon " paid, not with unsubstantial promises, 
 but with money down. There was always a 
 contest at Cheltenham ; but the result in my 
 time was invariably a "Yellow" victory, save 
 once, when a Sir Willoughby Jones, the " Blue" 
 candidate, was declared to head the poll. As, 
 however, he was promptly unseated on petition, 
 the incident scarcely amounts to an exception. 
 How or why a Tory borough so pertinaciously 
 40 
 
A Clerical Autocrat 
 
 returned the Whig candidate, I cannot tell. No 
 doubt the Berkeley Hunt, and the money it 
 brought into the town, was of importance to 
 the local tradesmen ; but so partial an explana- 
 tion of the paradox does not go far. 
 
 The influence of Berkeley Castle, however, 
 was paramount in politics only, and these, except 
 at election times, did not run high. The real 
 ruler of Cheltenham was the Rev. Francis Close, 
 then its Rector, afterwards Dean of Carlisle. 
 The patronage of the living was vested in 
 Simeon's Trustees ; and Close, an expert in 
 human nature as well as in rhetoric, made the 
 Evangelical pulpit of St. Mary's a sort of papal 
 throne. The extent of his social influence may 
 be gathered from the fact that, in a town whose 
 whole business was amusement, the theatre where 
 Sarah Siddons first attracted notice was per- 
 petually closed — the pun, as expressing the whole 
 state of things in a single word, needs no pardon. 
 No dramatic performance, other than amateur, 
 was possible during his reign. The races, too, 
 had to be banished to an inconvenient distance, 
 well out of the range of his sway. He could 
 not abolish the balls ; but that he diminished 
 attendance, and otherwise affected their success, 
 is certain. No doubt his field of operation 
 gave him some special advantages. His parish 
 
 41 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 swarmed with Indian colonels, and I have 
 observed that, be the reason what it may, the 
 typical Indian colonel is Puritan and Evangelical 
 by nature. His prestige too, as a preacher and 
 recognised representative of his school, would 
 attract many well-to-do persons to Cheltenham 
 for other reasons than health or pleasure. The 
 Oxford Movement had not as yet made any 
 conspicuous intrusion. It was only just visible 
 at St. John's, where one incumbent was strongly 
 suspected, in spite of his excessive corpulence, 
 of eating no butcher's meat on Fridays, and 
 where his successor, the Rev. G. Roberts, was 
 ostentatiously guilty of the enormity of preaching 
 in a surplice. There is some uncertainty among 
 collectors of rare books as to the anonymous 
 authorship of that more witty than reverent 
 treasury of clerical anecdote, " Speculum Epis- 
 copi." I can set the uncertainty at rest. Its 
 author was the Rev. George Roberts of St. 
 John's. We were not of his flock, but we knew 
 him well, and very delightful was he to know. 
 
 Too far remote, politically and socially, from 
 the Anglo-Indian colony to be counted among 
 its members was the Earl of Ellenborough, 
 though he had been Governor-General during 
 the two-and-a-half eventful years following the 
 massacre of Cabul, though his tall, lean figure, 
 42 
 
An Imperfect Anagram 
 
 curly locks, and fresh complexion — too curly and 
 too fresh, some insisted, to be the gifts of un- 
 assisted Nature — were familiar objects, and though 
 his seat of Southam was but three miles away. 
 One of the incidents of his Governor-Generalship 
 had been his restoration to Guzerat of the sandal- 
 wood gates of its ancient temple of Somnauth 
 on General Nott's capture of Ghuznee, whither 
 the gates had been transported by a previous 
 captor of Guzerat more than eight hundred years 
 before. This C02ip de thddtre, executed by a 
 vainglorious proclamation that provoked a good 
 deal of contemporary ridicule, was not forgotten 
 among the many neighbours of his who had 
 served the Company during his reign ; and it 
 was noted, as a fine stroke of satiric humour, 
 that "Somnauth" and "Southam" would have 
 formed a perfect anagram but for the absence 
 from the latter word of a single letter. Imperfect 
 as it was, Southam was quite near enough to 
 keep Somnauth's memory green. Of the Anglo- 
 Indian colony proper we were best acquainted 
 with Colonel and Major Burns, sons of the poet : 
 quiet elderly persons, with no paternal symptoms, 
 except that one of them used to sing some of his 
 father's songs, unaccompanied, in a thin, elderly 
 voice, but with considerable feeling. One of 
 them was a widower with a musical daughter. 
 
 43 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 But whether it was the Colonel or the Major that 
 sang, and whether the daughter's father or uncle 
 was Colonel or Major, I was never clear. Then 
 there were the Menteiths, father and son. The 
 son had an especial interest for me, for I had 
 fallen under the fascination of " Waverley," and 
 " Old Mortality," and " Redgauntlet," and " Rob 
 Roy " at a very early age indeed ; and he not 
 only possessed some relics of the '45, but was 
 himself so far a Jacobite as to break out with 
 " The Prance — The Prance! " (as he pronounced 
 what is written "Prince") whenever anybody 
 teased him by speaking of the Young Pretender. 
 I also called myself a Jacobite ; my heroes were 
 Clavers and Fergus Maclvor Vich Ian Vohr ; I 
 had precociously supplemented " Waverley " by 
 an eager and unquestioning study of the Memoirs 
 of the Chevalier Johnstone ; and I made out that 
 King Victor Emanuel of Sardinia represented 
 the title of the House of Stuart to the British 
 throne. On the last point I, of course, blundered 
 badly. But I must not let my first Jacobitical 
 propensities anticipate the contents of a much 
 later chapter. 
 
 44 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 " The Greater Wisdom "—School : old style— The Ex- 
 hibition of '51 — Cheltenham College — Some schoolfellows : 
 Lecky, Professor H. Jackson, F. W, H. Myers, Briton 
 Riviere, and others 
 
 If I Introduce into my recollections a working 
 watchmaker's daughter, who came into them as 
 a daily governess, and went out of them as the 
 bride of a Congregationalist minister, it is, first, 
 because I like to remember her for her own kind 
 sake ; secondly, and chiefly, because of the depth 
 and breadth of the gulf between the early educa- 
 tion of children as it was possible when she 
 conducted it, and the same thing now. Her 
 impressively dignified name was Sophia Major — 
 the Greater Wisdom. She gave us children 
 lessons for a couple of hours every morning 
 at home ; and, in my case at any rate, her 
 curriculum would now be considered insuffer- 
 ably meagre and dull. It consisted of the 
 accidence of the old Eton Latin Grammar 
 learned parrot-wise ; a translation of the Abb^ 
 Rollin's Ancient History, in many big volumes, 
 
 45 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 and Whiston's translation of Josephus, read 
 aloud ; and — that was all. I remember a single 
 spelling lesson, out of a once-brought spelling 
 book, in which "yacht" proved a puzzle ; but it 
 was otherwise unneeded. And I think I was 
 supposed to work an occasional sum, up to 
 simple subtraction. The morning's school ended 
 with a chapter of the Bible, chosen by oneself 
 and read to oneself in silence. My most frequent 
 choice was the hundred and seventeenth Psalm — 
 I need not explain why. But, dry, meagre, and 
 lifeless as all this sounds, and unadapted to what 
 are commonly supposed to be a child's needs, I 
 enjoyed my lessons, especially Rollin : the dull 
 old Abba's dull histories of Babylon or Macedon 
 were anything but dull to me. I think I must 
 have caught from Scott some of the faculty of 
 putting life into history ; of realising that its 
 makers and actors are not dead names buried in 
 books, but real men and women once as alive as 
 I, and, in their characters and actions, still as 
 alive. The faculty seems to be dying out under 
 the deadening influence of the great god Cram. 
 Then, too, I was intensely interested in the 
 Greater Wisdom's talk, though it must have been 
 far above my head — perhaps the more intensely 
 for that very reason. She was a Wesleyan ; and 
 her favourite topics were denominational differ- 
 
 46 
 
" The Greater Wisdom " 
 
 ences and the errors of the Church of Rome. 
 One result was a mental muddle out of which, 
 somewhere about my eighth birthday, I had set 
 about the idea of a Church which should bring 
 all differences and controversies to an end. I 
 was much attracted by what I had been told of 
 the Quakers : I had, as I have said, read Josephus 
 — his " Antiquities of the Jews " — and, of course, 
 " Ivanhoe." So my Church of the Future was 
 to be, as I should describe it now, a combination 
 of Quaker Quietism, Hebraic ritual, and some 
 esoteric mystery, as suggested by my acquaint- 
 ance with Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert. It was 
 also to have a distinctive costume. Unfortunately 
 there were three points at which the scheme 
 broke down. I could not hit upon a sufficient 
 secret, nor upon a suitable dress, nor — most 
 important of all — upon a satisfactory name for 
 the Church that was not to be. 
 
 Moreover, my ecclesiastical speculations were 
 interrupted by my transference from the tuition 
 of the Greater Wisdom to the desks and forms 
 of a neighbouring school, where I found myself 
 one of some sixty school-fellows of all ages ; 
 some boarders, but the greater number living, 
 like me, at home in the town. It had a good 
 repute at that time, but its claim to a place in 
 these pages is as an illustration of sweeping 
 
 47 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 change : as an example of a then quite ordinary 
 type of private school, no longer to be found. 
 The master, who impressed parents by his burly 
 good looks and apparent bonhomie, resembled 
 Shakespeare, as I came to perceive later, in the 
 littleness of his Latin and the lessness of his 
 Greek. But he made up for any deficiencies of 
 that sort by the engagement of one fairly com- 
 petent usher, and of a wholly competent bundle 
 of canes. I never made personal acquaintance 
 with the latter. But it was a common thing to 
 see a boy seized by the collar of his jacket and, 
 for some infinitesimal offence, publicly and 
 savagely flogged all over the schoolroom, to the 
 scattering of spectators and -the upsetting of 
 forms, till the splintered cane could do its work 
 no more. My detestation of injustice and cruelty 
 was as strong then as now, and much more 
 sensitive, and I thought I perceived a blend of 
 both, especially as the cane had a noticeable 
 preference for boarders — that is to say, for those 
 without friends whose attention it might be 
 impolitic to draw. Then, too, his partiality for 
 raw onions at his midday meal offended my 
 fastidious nose, and his little stock of coarsely 
 facetious anecdotes, trotted out when he was in 
 a good humour, my scarcely less fastidious ears. 
 His, or rather his usher's, curriculum was about 
 
 48 
 
School— Old Style 
 
 as meagre as that of our ex-governess, and much 
 more dull : the Eton Latin Grammar ; Valpy's 
 Latin Delectus, of which every word had to 
 be separately and minutely parsed ; the Greek 
 accidence ; the Facetiae of Hierocles in the book 
 called Analecta Gra^ca Minora; a very little 
 Euclid — whether anybody passed the Asses' 
 Bridge I think unlikely ; a great deal of English 
 dictation ; and daily practice in the Rule of Three. 
 I have called it meagre and dull, but I think it 
 was thorough within its limits — at least in the 
 hands of the usher in question. After he carried 
 his consumptive tendency to Australia the school, 
 gradually but regularly, fell off in numbers and 
 altogether ran down. I do not think that more 
 than two dozen out of the sixty boys were left 
 at it when my time there came to an end. 
 
 About that time occurred an experience that 
 ought to be, but is not, among the principal of 
 my memories — a visit to the Great Exhibition 
 of 185 1. I was by no means too young or too 
 ignorant, certainly anything but too apathetic, 
 to take an intelligent and enduring interest in 
 what I saw, and was the talk and wonder of the 
 world in a way with which not even the most 
 ambitious of its subsequent imitations can re- 
 motely compare. But it remains in my mind a 
 mere formless blur of colour, heat, and crowd, 
 E 49 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 with a delightful iced drink for its solitary detail. 
 We took it on our way to Littlehampton for the 
 summer holidays ; and far more distinct than 
 all the fondly supposed triumph of Peace and 
 Industry (though in fact the harbinger of over 
 sixty years of almost incessant war) remains the 
 feudal keep of Arundel, with its guardian owls. 
 That was an excitement : and my strong im- 
 pression is that I was heartily bored by the 
 glories of the Great Exhibition of 1 85 1 . Anyhow 
 I have never visited any other : perhaps that is 
 why. 
 
 Two tutors succeeded my schoolmaster. The 
 first was the Unitarian minister, the Rev. John 
 Dendy, who had been through Manchester New 
 College and the University of Berlin, and was 
 thus a German scholar rather earlier than German 
 scholarship obtained its vogue. I do not think 
 that I or my brother made much way with the 
 grammar of the language — that I did not, I more 
 than think ; but I have never ceased to be 
 grateful to him for initiation into the wonder- 
 world of its poetry. For many years since I 
 entered "The Castle by the Sea" attempts to 
 represent German poetry by English verse were 
 among my pleasures. As things German are 
 not in popular favour just now, I will here say 
 at once that, in spite of my French extraction, 
 50 
 
Cheltenham College 
 
 I have a sympathetic Hking for them — save 
 always for German prose. Dendy, on leaving 
 Cheltenham, was succeeded in our tutorship by 
 one William Buckell, a mathematician of St. 
 John's, Cambridge : and then came five years 
 of Cheltenham College. " College," though 
 under protest, I must needs call it, in accordance 
 with the common-sense doctrine of Lord Chief 
 Justice Coke, that one's name is that whereby 
 one is known. 
 
 Though no older than myself when I entered 
 it, Cheltenham College already mustered six 
 hundred boys, representing the six hundred 
 shares, each of which conferred upon its holder 
 the right of a single presentation. It had not 
 been modelled on precedent. Instead of the 
 usual division into forms, there were twelve 
 classes on the classical side, the first class corre- 
 sponding with the sixth form elsewhere, one 
 half of it under the Principal's immediate tuition, 
 the other half under the Vice-Principal's ; the 
 lowest classes included children of six and seven. 
 There was also a modern side — I suppose 
 among the earliest and certainly among the most 
 successful of the kind — with a Head Master and 
 staff of its own. The majority of the boys 
 boarded in the masters' houses, in numbers 
 varying from one or two up to seventy or eighty, 
 
 51 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 under as much or as little discipline as the house- 
 master might please — of general discipline there 
 was, out of school hours, virtually none. There 
 were no prefects, no monitors, no bounds, no 
 compulsory games ; and the school was too 
 young to have evolved those traditions which 
 are a kind of discipline in themselves. Not for 
 at least two years after my entrance had it a 
 chapel of its own, borrowing the use of a neigh- 
 bouring church for the week's sole service on 
 Sunday afternoon. When not actually in our 
 class-rooms we day-boys at any rate, and those 
 in the small houses who were practically day- 
 boys, knew no law or surveillance but of their 
 own homes ; and the then atmosphere of Chelten- 
 ham, as I have previously tried to convey it, 
 was certainly not an ideal one for boys of the 
 public school ages. Of course I am speaking 
 strictly and solely of my own time. Neither 
 has the Cheltenham of to-day any recognisable 
 resemblance to what Cheltenham was before 
 education became its staple, nor the College as 
 it is to the thirteen-year-old experiment without 
 experience of sixty years ago. 
 
 The second-appointed Principal, who had, in 
 fewer than those thirteen years, raised its numbers 
 from a mere handful of local pupils to six hundred 
 from everywhere — the Rev. William Dobson — 
 
 52 
 
Principal William Dobson 
 
 was a really memorable personality ; no list of 
 the great schoolmasters would be complete 
 without his name. He had come from Cambridse 
 with the prestige of a Fellow of Trinity, of third 
 classic in the year when Shilleto was second, 
 and of some pugilistic championship — I forget 
 of what kind. It must, however, have been of 
 a heavy-weight order, for he was a man of com- 
 manding presence ; and this, added to an imper- 
 turbable temper, and a talent for cold and cutting 
 sarcasm, made the more incisive by a curious 
 nasal twang, kept masters and boys — even, I 
 believe, the Board of Directors — in a state of 
 distant awe. He did not mix with the former, 
 nor I believe in society of any kind, though he 
 had daughters who did ; his only known re- 
 creation consisted in long up-hill tramps on 
 Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, at express 
 speed, with an iron bar for a walking-stick, and 
 a little mathematical master trotting and panting 
 at his heels. The apparently silent companion- 
 ship would have been comic, had it been possible 
 to associate anything comic with the idea of the 
 Rev. William Dobson, M.A. With the five 
 hundred and eighty-five boys who were not 
 immediately under him in his first class, he 
 seemed to give himself no concern. Probably 
 he hejd that their morals and conduct were the 
 
 53 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 proper business of their parents or house-masters, 
 and was wise enough to appoint class-masters 
 whom he could trust to do their duty, and then 
 to trust them entirely — the grand secret of all suc- 
 cessful organisation on a large scale. His authority 
 was unquestioned and unquestionable, and this 
 without the support of the cane, though a flogging 
 consequent upon a master's report was not quite 
 unknown. He never preached or ministered in 
 the chapel. In short, he devoted the whole of 
 his energy, and it was immense — even, as proved 
 at last, beyond breaking point — not to the 
 education of religion or morals, but to running 
 his class for University scholarships; and his 
 candidate seldom failed. In this matter, under 
 his rdgime, Cheltenham became second to no 
 school in the land, and it was thus that it was 
 made. The Vice-Principal was a senior classic and 
 former Fellow of Trinity — no less a person than 
 the Rev. Hubert Ashton Holden, the compiler, 
 as every schoolboy and ex-schoolboy knows, of 
 the " FoliorumSilvula," a volume which transcends 
 its purpose as a collection of passages for render- 
 ing into Latin verse in being the best of English 
 anthologies into the bargain. But my personal 
 recollection of him is confined to his sandy 
 whiskers ; I wish it ran to more. 
 
 Reminiscences are not necessarily confessions. 
 
 54 
 
A Confession 
 
 If they were, these would remain unwritten. But 
 before I proceed I feel bound in honour to make 
 one confession, though it should deprive me of 
 the esteem of every right-minded reader. It is 
 this — I have not, and never had, a particle of 
 affection for my old school. Perhaps I was a 
 little unlucky at starting, entering in the middle 
 of a half-year ("terms" were terms unknown), 
 and so having no companions in the trials of a 
 new boy. I was developing a morbid shyness 
 from which I was to suffer for many, many years 
 to come : from which I cannot say that I suffer 
 still, only because I have learned to take it 
 philosophically, as something that one can't get 
 rid of but that doesn't matter. I had not a single 
 popular quality. I made none of the friendships 
 that I envied ; possibly because I so consciously 
 envied them. I played no games : they were not 
 compulsory : and the consequence of this, among 
 other things, was that I took no part in the 
 school life out of school. I had my own un- 
 shared pursuits and interests — plenty of them ; 
 so much so that I regarded school hours and the 
 evening's preparation as inflictions to be brought 
 to an irreducible minimun of evil. So I need 
 hardly say that my promotions were slow, and 
 my place in my classes seldom high. Yet all the 
 while I would have given everything I can think 
 
 55 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 of to be what others were, or seemed to be, so 
 that I might not feel myself looked upon as a 
 negligible oddity ; for of course to think oneself 
 thought about is among the chief torments of the 
 shy. I was, however, less alone than I believed. 
 Exactly opposite to our house lived a weird 
 mathematical master who boarded two or three 
 of my schoolfellows. One of these was Lecky, 
 the historian ; the same quaint, gaunt, shambling 
 figure of a boy as afterwards of a man. I knew 
 him no more than by sight, though our daily 
 way to and from school was the same. And 
 according to the Life of him written by his 
 widow, he looked back upon Cheltenham College 
 not with my mere lack of affection, but with 
 downright detestation, for no better reasons than 
 have compelled my own confession. The reasons 
 were bad enough — but there they were. 
 
 I came, however, to feel less like a fish out of 
 water after a translation from Plato's " Gorgias " 
 had sent me at a single bound, and out of the 
 regular course, among the Principal's own fifteen. 
 To have had such an immediate result, the trans- 
 lation must have been good indeed, and have 
 shown more promise than I was able to fulfil in 
 the remotest comparison with my companions 
 in the Principal's side of Class 1, Its head, with 
 fixity of tenure, was Henry Jackson, now Regius 
 
 56 
 
Head Boys of the School 
 
 Professor of Greek at Cambridge. The second 
 seat was no less permanently occupied by 
 Frederic William Henry Myers, of psychical 
 research celebrity. He had taken the place he 
 held at seventeen when he first entered the school 
 at the age of thirteen : an instance of precocious 
 scholarship rare enough to be worth recording. 
 Nor was he a mere scholar. He was our poet ; 
 and while still a boy was a Tennysonian enthusiast 
 who could show reason for his faith at the time 
 when quite intelligent men and women scoffed at 
 "Maud," and found "In Memoriam" obscure. 
 On the practical value of his excursions into the 
 occult world, opinions may and do so legitimately 
 differ that I am entitled to express my own, 
 founded as it is upon the likeness of the boy to 
 the man — namely, that he was gifted with real 
 imaginative genius misapplied to subjects only 
 befogged by his speculative subtlety and literary 
 charm. 
 
 These were the acknowledged heads. I re- 
 mained among the vertebrae of the tail, while 
 making a kind of career for myself in Modern 
 History, on which the first and second classes 
 had weekly lectures from one of the masters of 
 the latter, and in what we called Divinity, which 
 was mainly another branch of history under 
 another name. But these were not Greek : and 
 
 57 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 I fancy that Dobson must have been disappointed 
 in me. An any rate the only event for which he 
 entered me was an Exhibition at Trinity Hall, 
 Cambridge. I failed ; but as one successful 
 competitor was to be a Senior Wrangler and 
 the other a Double First, my failure was not 
 surprising. Of my victors I shall have occasion 
 to speak later. Meanwhile, though my imaginary 
 incapacity for intimate friendship remained as 
 strong and as effectual as if it had been real, 
 I was on quite good terms with my class-fellows. 
 I hope I shall not offend any of them by sug- 
 gesting that a certain priggishness was among 
 the marks of our distinction from the outer and 
 inferior world. Among other distinctive marks 
 had been the fashion of a monocle, whether 
 needed or not ; but that had gone out before 
 my time : the only wearer of an eyeglass was 
 Jackson, by whose near-sightedness it was un- 
 affectedly required. But we were still aloof. 
 The playground knew us not, with the ex- 
 ception of tall and handsome Brandt, who was 
 in the eleven, besides coming next in the class 
 to Myers : so in this respect I was no longer 
 alone. I have spoken of the lax discipline of 
 the school at large, and of its then prevalent 
 vocabulary the less that is repeated the better. 
 But we were punctiliously well-behaved, and, 
 
 58 
 
School Debating Society 
 
 among us, an oath or foul word was unknown. 
 Some of us were keen politicians ; two or three 
 had been caught in the ritualistic tide that had 
 risen higher since the departure of the Rev. 
 Francis Close to the Deanery of Carlisle. 
 Another thing that brought me somewhat out 
 of my shell was a Debating Society, open to 
 the first two classes, that discussed politics, his- 
 tory, and literature every Monday after morning 
 school. I find from its records that its original 
 President and Secretary were, respectively, 
 Alsager Hay-Hill, of whom more hereafter, 
 and Sir Charles Young, afterwards associated 
 with Lady Monckton as a star of the amateur 
 stage. My impression is that, with the exception 
 of Myers, Jackson, and fervidly fluent Francis 
 Lloyd Bagshawe, our collective standard either 
 of eloquence or argument was not high. Had 
 it been, I am quite sure that I should have 
 remained dumb. As it is, I can only wonder 
 at the recorded evidence which assures me that 
 I addressed the House no fewer than eighteen 
 times. At any rate we took ourselves and our 
 subjects of discussion very seriously indeed, all 
 the forms and courtesies of debate being punc- 
 tiliously observed. We could unbend, however, 
 on occasion. The close of a Session was cele- 
 brated by an elaborate supper at one of the 
 
 59 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 hotels, with punch and song, and without any 
 supervision or control. 
 
 Of the school-fellows whom I have not men- 
 tioned, John Morley (Lord Morley of Blackburn) 
 was too much my senior, and " Bob" Reid (Lord 
 Loreburn) too much my junior, for me to have 
 come in contact with either of them. So far as 
 I remember, or am acquainted with future careers, 
 the most distinguished of my earlier contem- 
 poraries and class-fellows was Robert William 
 Raper : my most vivid recollection of the present 
 Vice-President of Trinity, Oxford, being his 
 appearance one morning with a mass of many- 
 coloured bruises instead of a face — what was the 
 condition of the other fellow I did not see. 
 I am not forgetting Briton Riviere, R.A. : only 
 doubtful whether to count him as a school-fellow. 
 I am almost sure he never wore the " mortar- 
 board " with the scarlet tassel that distinguished 
 us from the boys of the Grammar School, whom 
 their Elizabethan foundation had admittedly 
 entitled to the more academic black tassel, to 
 the exclusion of a new-fangled affair without 
 any foundation at all. He attended the studio 
 as pupil 6f his father, William Riviere, who 
 was our principal drawing master : and as I, 
 among my other occupations, wasted a regret- 
 table amount of time, sepia, and Payne's grey 
 60 
 
The Rivieres 
 
 in the same room, and as our homeward ways 
 lay partly together, I became well acquainted 
 with both father and son — at any rate with the 
 father, for it was almost out of the question to 
 become acquainted with anybody else when he 
 was to the fore. William Riviere was an artist 
 of real merit in the grandiose "history" style, 
 as was recognised by his commission for the 
 frescoes in the Oxford Union. No doubt he 
 was also a competent teacher for a competent 
 pupil ; but his flood of talk was rather bewilder- 
 ing to such as I. A favourite aphorism of his, 
 " The eye doesn't see what the mind doesn't 
 look for," bewilders me still, because I know, 
 for a hard and painful fact, that I see a great 
 many things that I should never dream of looking 
 for, and would very much rather not see. And 
 his dictum, when discoursing on perspective, that 
 "the point of sight is the eye of the spectator" 
 would, were it translated from paradox into 
 practice, have a wild result indeed. But there 
 was something; stimulatincj about him : and it 
 was impossible not to have a cordial liking both 
 for the father who talked so much and did so 
 little, and for the quiet son, who talked so little, 
 and has done — what he has done. 
 
 6i 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 A visit to Ireland — Modem language teaching : very old 
 style — A German tour — Llandudno and Bournemouth in 
 the 'fifties—" I'd e'en let them bide "—An old-world 
 village 
 
 So much for school memories : of which I have 
 made so much in bulk out of so little of importance 
 because I am quite sure that they will not in the 
 least resemble those of any present-day schoolboys 
 who fifty years hence will be writing out theirs. 
 They will not be able to remember the great 
 gulf fixed between masters and boys ; the frigid 
 toleration, which had scarcely yet taken the place 
 of the active discouragement, of games ; the lack 
 of organised discipline — though in that respect 
 the Cheltenham of my time was not typical of 
 the great schools of any period ; the admission 
 of little children, who ought to have been, if not 
 in the nursery, at any rate at a school adapted 
 to their age ; the absence of physical training ; 
 the contempt for modern languages and their 
 teachers ; the cultivation of Latin and Greek as 
 the whole duty of boy and man. But if, in 
 62 
 
A Visit to Ireland 
 
 explaining at such length my lack of affection 
 for my old school, I have suggested an unhappy 
 boyhood, the impression thus conveyed is exceed- 
 ingly wrong. Were it worth while, I could, 
 for my own pleasure, tell of very good times out 
 of school : and the bad times in it did not, at 
 most and worst, occupy more than thirty hours 
 a week for thirty-nine weeks out of the fifty-two. 
 It is my present business, however, to remember 
 only such incidents as tell of after-changes. There 
 was, for example, my only visit to Ireland ; it 
 was made, with my father, to an old and intimate 
 friend of his, the Ven. Charles Strong, Arch- 
 deacon of Glendalough, who lived in Dublin, 
 and was continued to some great friends of the 
 Archdeacon at then remote Rathdrum. Our 
 host here was one of two medical practitioners 
 popularly known by their respective partisans 
 as "The Red Doctor" and "The Black 
 Doctor " — he, the Red, and his tribe of stal- 
 wart sons who seemed to have nothing to do 
 and to do it as if they liked it, ably represented 
 a national hospitality which unquestionably re- 
 mains unchanged. Unchanged too, I may trust, 
 are the surrounding beauties, wild or mild, of 
 County Wicklow, " the Garden of Ireland," in 
 spite of their having since become more accessible 
 through the substitution of the railway train for 
 
 63 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 the "low-backed car" and of the motor for the 
 train. The passage from Holyhead to Kingstown 
 then took seven hours, and often many more. 
 It was my first crossing of the sea. 
 
 My second, two or three years later, was from 
 St. Katherine's Dock to Hamburg, and the 
 hours it occupied were fifty-two. A passage 
 from Liverpool to New York has occupied barely 
 more than twice the time. We, my brother and 
 myself, had not dropped our German when we 
 lost our first tutor, but took lessons in it at home, 
 right through our school-days, from one Herr 
 Wilhelm Jung, who combined the vocations of 
 teacher of languages and nursery-gardener. He 
 was a really delightful teacher, with an amiable 
 and vivacious vanity that one can only sup- 
 pose to have been acquired in France — it was 
 certainly not German : and a boyishness that 
 soon made us boys his familiar, possibly somewhat 
 over-familiar, friends. Among his merits, too, 
 was a poodle who had been taught tricks, and 
 whose unusually extensive repertoire sometimes 
 left but little time for irregular verbs. Of course 
 there ought to have been no occasion for Herr 
 Wilhelm Jung. There was a master at the 
 College for teaching French and German to some 
 of the middle classes : nobody above the third 
 was supposed to have time for such unclassical 
 
 64 
 
Modern Language Teaching 
 
 frivolity. But the choice of the sohtary modern 
 language-master was curiously limited. He must 
 not be a Frenchman, however capable, because 
 of the fear of the Board of Directors that he 
 might be a Jesuit in disguise. So, in order to 
 ensure the requisite bilingualism, the appointment 
 had been given to an Alsatian, with a name 
 German enough to vouch, in the Directors* 
 opinion, for his character as a genuine Lutheran, 
 an atrocious accent, and an equally atrocious 
 temper of the kind that renders a foreigner a 
 glorious butt for British boys. His lesson simply 
 meant an hour of impudent provocation on their 
 part and, on his, of pitiably impotent rage. And 
 there was nobody to interfere. It was only 
 French and German — what did they signify ? 
 I believe they received more respect on the 
 Modern side of the school, but I do not know. 
 
 But I have been a long time on the way to 
 Hamburg, whither my brother and I accompanied 
 Herr Wilhelm at the beginning of the last of my 
 summer holidays : he to revisit long unvisited 
 relations and friends ; vv^e to see something of 
 " abroad " and to pick up what acquaintance we 
 might with German homes and ways. It was in 
 the main a thoroughly unconventional tour, such 
 as I have always preferred to well-frequented 
 roads. From Hamburg we went straight to 
 F 65 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Berlin, not yet the overgrown and overgrowing 
 capital of an empire, but with still something of 
 a homely and provincial atmosphere that was 
 anything but sweetened by a system of open 
 sewers, wide and deep, and filled with wholly 
 black and semi-stagnant ooze. Thence to Danzig 
 and Konigsberg, where one might more than 
 merely fancy oneself in mediaeval Poland, and 
 where ringleted Jews, in caftan and gaberdine, 
 emphasised the illusion — if illusion it were ; for 
 the middle ages are not easily killed. At Konigs- 
 berg we stayed with a sister of Herr Wilhelm, 
 married to the master of an iron foundry. They 
 lived at the works, where the great steam hammer 
 never rested night or day ; how they and we 
 slept so^jndly through moments each of which 
 was a bang that set the house trembling is more 
 than I can explain. Our host, like most people 
 who indulge a large extravagance, prided himself 
 on an economy. His expenditure on cigars must 
 have been prodigious, for his emission of their 
 smoke was as ceaseless as the blows of his 
 hammer ; it was not interrupted even during 
 meals, which took the form of a puff and a mouth- 
 ful, and so on to the end. But then, " See," he 
 boasted, " what I save in matches!" His method 
 for effecting this compensation was to light his 
 earliest cigar at the forge and then one from 
 66 
 
A German Tour 
 
 another, each from the stump of its predecessor, 
 throughout the day. 
 
 Thence back to BerHn ; thence by Halle to 
 Arnstadt, where the railway came to an end ; and 
 thence by sarcastically termed Eilwagen, as if one 
 should call a tortoise a hare, to the quaint, out-of- 
 the-world little town of Schleuszingen, in the 
 heart of the great Thuringian Forest, Herr 
 Wilhelm's native place, and still his widowed 
 mother's and an unmarried sister's abode. I 
 believe they had never left it in all their days. 
 Here we made our longest stay : and among the 
 choicest of my memories is the kindly reception 
 of two English lads, the first and only English 
 visitors within human knowledge, into this simple 
 and leisurely life of that little pine-scented forest 
 town. Though simple and leisurely, it was any- 
 thing but dull. There was the yearly shooting- 
 festival, of which the principal item was not so 
 much the marksmanship as the concluding ban- 
 quet attended by everybody of the male sex who 
 was anybody — and everybody was somebody in 
 so small a social circle : the doctor, or the lawyer, 
 or the forester, and so on. No doubt a longer 
 stay would have revealed some at least of the 
 besetting sins of all little country towns, when 
 self-absorbed, where everybody discusses every- 
 body else's affairs. Meanwhile it seemed to us 
 
 67 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 that a friendlier place would be impossible to 
 find. It was the doctor who on our occasion 
 presided over the feast, and, when the feasters 
 had satisfied appetites so healthy as to suggest 
 that even a solitary physician was one more than 
 was needfijl, and had settled down to the solid 
 business of the worst of tobacco and the best of 
 beer, conducted the singing in parts of the folk- 
 songs that display the veritable soul of the race 
 whence they have sprung. For, despite philoso- 
 phies, politics, critical aesthetics, and all such 
 superficial muddles, it remains, deep down, a very 
 simple, sincere, and homely soul. Then there 
 were excursions, always in pleasant company, for 
 which everybody always had plenty of time ; and, 
 on general principles, one must indeed be dull in 
 oneself to find a forest dull. 
 
 Our homeward route was more conventional, 
 by way of Erfurt, Frankfort, the Rhine, Cologne, 
 and Brussels. But these denote changes. The 
 Judengasse, the Jews' quarters of Frankfort, was 
 still to be seen and remembered ; and railways 
 and factories had not even begun to rob the Rhine 
 of the whole of its romantic charm. I do not care 
 to dispute the opinion that they have substituted 
 better things. But I could not honestly feel 
 them to be better when, many years later, I went 
 by rail along the Rhine. 
 68 
 
The Llandudno of those Days 
 
 Other such changes come in a crowd. Llan- 
 dudno, as I knew it, was httle more than a 
 mining village ; the railway came no nearer than 
 Conway; the Great Orme was in a state of 
 nature ; there were no shops, and unless one 
 were staying at the hotel — there was one even 
 then, for enterprising visitors who regarded such 
 uncivilised conditions as merits — there was con- 
 siderable likelihood of spending a day without a 
 dinner ; no trivial misfortune in such appetising 
 air. I have been told by one whose visit was 
 but a summer or two earlier than ours that the 
 only accommodation he could find for himself 
 and his family was in a miner's cottage, and that 
 when provisions ran short he would take to the 
 road, stop any likely woman who carried a basket, 
 and if this contained a fowl or any such matter 
 on its way to the hotel or other expectant con- 
 sumer, compel her to stand and deliver on what 
 he considered equitable terms. However, things 
 had ceased to be quite at that pass, for two or 
 three bathing-machines were already a conse- 
 quence of the hotel, and one of these was utilised, 
 at any rate once in the week, for the sale of 
 joints of mutton. A first visit to Bettws-y-Coed 
 was to the primitive Bettws of David Cox, while 
 yet unbrushed and uncombed, a sleeping beauty 
 as undreaming of steam as of petrol : a later was 
 
 69 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 to a town with its streets, its railway stations, its 
 hotels, nay, even its rank of hansoms : I shall 
 assuredly never pay it a third. Bournemouth, 
 too, is only known to me as a village in a pine- 
 wood, with no railway station nearer than Poole, 
 four miles away, and its suburb of Boscombe as 
 a Howery solitude without a human dwelling, and 
 probably not another human being, in view. Of 
 all nonsense, none is more nonsensical than the 
 notion that an appreciation of natural scenery is 
 ot modern development, or commonly sincere. If 
 we loved it only half as much as we profess, 
 obviously we should leave it alone — at least here 
 and there, and now and then. A fine story of 
 "Johnny" Lang, the brother of Andrew, is told 
 in the Reminiscences of their aunt, Mrs. Sellar 
 (I quote from memory, and the familiar "Johnny" 
 is hers). When he was ten years old, he was 
 one day sitting on a hill-side in earnest contem- 
 plation of the wide and varied landscape below. 
 After a long and evidently thoughtful silence, 
 '• I know," said he, " what I would do with all 
 yon bonny lochs and burns if they were mine." 
 " And what would you do with them ? " asked 
 his aunt, naturally supposing that he had been 
 evolving some boyish scheme of irrigation, or 
 application of water power. And Johnny's answer 
 was, "I'd e'en let them bide." 
 70 
 
An Old-World Village 
 
 The happiest reminiscences, however, of my 
 school days are of another order. The husband 
 of one of my mother's sisters — very, very dear 
 is her memory ! — was the tenant of two large 
 farms at Yattendon in Berkshire, midway between 
 Newbury and Pangbourne, six good miles from 
 either rail or town. Yattendon has latterly 
 emerged from an immemorial obscurity into 
 literary history as the sometime abode of a poet 
 — Robert Bridges — in the list of whose works 
 appears a " Yattendon Hymnal." In my time, 
 at any rate, it typified the undiscovered, purely 
 agricultural village of the south midlands, such 
 as one comes across in novels, but less and less 
 often out of them. The cottag-es stras^Sfled round 
 a green, over a corner of which hung the rudely 
 painted and weather-beaten sign of the Royal 
 Oak ; it looked as if some trooper who had 
 charged at not distant Newbury might have set 
 it up so soon as the King enjoyed his own again ; 
 and not a day later. There was the squire's 
 house hard by, not very regularly occupied, for 
 the squire and his lady had some pretensions 
 to fashion, observed the London season, and 
 were without sons or daughters to turn a house 
 into a home. There was the church, with its 
 unkempt churchyard, and its high, baize-lined 
 pews, where there was no risk of being caught 
 
 71 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 nappinor while the black-gowned rector, the 
 squire's brother, preached sermons that suggested, 
 without wholly resembling, the bones in the 
 valley of Jehoshaphat. For, although notably 
 dry, they were by no means very many, there 
 being but one service in the week, alternately 
 morning and evening ; his neighbouring rectory 
 of Frilsham receiving the like attention on the 
 alternate evenings and mornings. Nor is the 
 comparison of the bones so far-fetched as it may 
 have seemed, inasmuch as they were the subject 
 of the only sermon of his that I can recall. He 
 was a worthy old gentleman, who doubtless did 
 his duty by the some three hundred bodies and 
 souls (counting both parishes together) under his 
 unassisted care : of Dissent, or of any other 
 dissatisfaction with the established order of all 
 things, no visible symptom was to be found. 
 Then, under his more immediate care, were the 
 bodies and souls of his own brood of sons, with 
 whom we two boys, of much the same ages, were 
 on friendly an^, companionable terms. And, 
 above all things, were the copses and glades 
 of the commons that stretched far and wide 
 around — Ashampstead, Frilsham, Bucklebury, 
 Coldash, and the rest — so infinitely delightful to 
 explore ; so certain of never being wholly ex- 
 plored. 
 73 
 
Revisiting Old Scenes 
 
 ' ' Many years later, indeed when well into 
 middle age, I cycled from Newbury to Pang- 
 bourne for the sake of passing through the 
 village which I had never seen since my teens. 
 Well — there were still the six Lombardy poplars 
 at the end of the garden ; that was all right. 
 But instead of the well-remembered copse at the 
 hill-top was a big new mansion ; one side of the 
 Green was occupied by the conventionally up-to- 
 date buildings of a no doubt much-needed school ; 
 the Royal Oak had been smartened, and its sign 
 repainted ; the churchyard had been decently 
 trimmed ; the church restored. All was, beyond 
 question, a change for the better. . . . 
 
 But this, from first to last, is a chapter with a 
 moral — Never, if you can help it, revisit a place 
 where you had a good time long ago. 
 
 73 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 Trinity Hall — "Ben" Latham — Henry Fawcett — Leslie 
 Stephen— Alsager Hay-Hill— The Chit-Chat Club— Alfred 
 Ainger — Robert Romer — Bryan Walker — The original 
 "Tom Brown "?— Charles Dilke — Walter Scott Coward- 
 Charles Kingsley's inaugural lecture— Cambridge : a 
 contrast — Beauty and the Beast 
 
 Before leaving school I had eaten my first term 
 as a student of the Honourable Society of Gray's 
 Inn. The next milestone in my memory is my 
 entrance as a pensioner — a term, as every Cam- 
 bridge man knows, meaning the direct opposite 
 of its ordinary signification — of Trinity Hall, and 
 I was presently admitted a Scholar on the same 
 foundation. 
 
 The " College or Hall of the Holy Trinity of 
 Norwich," to give it its full original designation, 
 was, during my undergraduate days, in a state 
 of transition. From its earliest period its speciality 
 had been neither mathematics nor classics, but 
 the Civil Law, a full third of the class lists of 
 that faculty having been supplied by this one 
 college, and nearly half its first classes. Only 
 three of the thirteen Fellows were required to 
 
 74 
 
Trinity Hall 
 
 be in orders ; and this condition was not in- 
 dispensable. The Master was invariably a lay- 
 man and a lawyer : at any rate since the 
 mastership of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester — 
 and he was esteemed the greatest canonist of 
 his time. The College of Advocates known as 
 Doctors' Commons was established in its historic 
 quarters by a Dean of the Arches, Dr. Hervey, 
 who was also at the same time Master of Trinity 
 Hall ; and the same two offices had been like- 
 wise united in Sir Herbert Jenner-Fust, the 
 immediate predecessor of Dr. Geldart, Master 
 throughout my time. In short the college had 
 been among the principal nurseries of Doctors' 
 Commons until the latter, by ceasing to exist, 
 to some extent deprived the former of its special 
 reason for existing. There was a legend that 
 a Don from another college, dining as the guest 
 of the senior tutor at the high table, some days 
 after the general gathering at the beginning of 
 Michaelmas term, inquired of his host, " And 
 when do your men come up ? " — for his view 
 from the dais was of an elsewhere empty hall. 
 "They are up; there they are," answered the 
 tutor, triumphantly pointing to a solitary under- 
 graduate feeding in a remote corner. However 
 this may be. Trinity Hall had become one of 
 the smallest of small colleges, when the Rev. 
 
 75 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Henry Latham was imported into one of its 
 three clerical fellowships from its gigantic 
 neighbour Trinity. Were I writing for Hall 
 men only, of my own and the following genera- 
 tions, there would be no need of another word 
 to remind them of how " Ben " Latham — as for 
 some lost reason he was invariably called — 
 devoted himself to what he considered the 
 welfare of the college of which he was senior 
 tutor, Vice- Master, and finally Master in suc- 
 cession to that great jurist Sir Henry Sumner 
 Maine — thus breaking the line of lay and legal 
 Masters for the first time since Henry VHL 
 was King. He literally lived for Trinity Hall : 
 his whole ambition was to obtain for Trinity 
 Hall a great and distinguished place in the 
 University at large : and, being a man of single 
 purpose, business capacity, patient tact, and a 
 way of inspiring respectful if slightly humorous 
 affection — for he had certain small oddities, such 
 as an inability to pronounce the letter R — a con- 
 siderable amount of success, at any rate of what 
 he considered such, was not slow in coming. 
 I say " of what he considered such " because, 
 not being himself a Hall man, he had no com- 
 punction in sapping the tradition and altering 
 the atmosphere that had given the Law College 
 a distinctive character of its own. I have met 
 
 76 
 
" Ben " Latham 
 
 with men older than myself, and even with 
 younger, who held that Latham had spoiled the 
 college, as something szci generis, by putting 
 it in competition with all the others. They felt 
 as if a happy and contented family party had 
 been broken up, or rather swamped by the 
 intrusion of strangers ignorant or careless of 
 its hereditary ways. But it was a proud day 
 for the college, as well as for " Ben " Latham, 
 when, in one and the same academic year, 
 1862-3, Trinity Hall hailed its first Senior 
 Wrangler ; won, for the first time, a double 
 first ; and last, but by no means least, rowed 
 head of the river. That it also monopolised 
 the first class in law was only in the natural 
 course of its unregenerate times. 
 
 When I entered the attic rooms wherein I was 
 to " keep " for over three years to come, the 
 number of undergraduates had already risen to 
 seventy, and to the position of sixth among all 
 colleges exclusive of Trinity and St. John's ; 
 and of these certainly not more than a dozen 
 took their degrees in Law. The seventy are 
 now more than doubled, so well does success 
 succeed. But that is by the way. The old state 
 of things had still left its quite perceptible traces. 
 The Master and several of the Fellows had 
 been of Doctors' Commons. Among the some- 
 
 77 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 time Fellows was Dr. Abdy, the then Regius 
 Professor of the Civil Law, the twelfth of Trinity 
 Hall, in unbroken succession, since 1663 ; and 
 we had a Law lecturer of our own. Three 
 valuable studentships had been founded for 
 graduates intending to be lawyers. Our gown 
 was scarcely distinguishable from that of the 
 Bar. And among the undergraduates were still 
 extant the names of generations of Doctors and 
 Proctors — Jenner, Bayford, Tebbs, and others, 
 to represent the ancien rdgwte. The Hall was, 
 in short, still, to some extent, a legal college, 
 though the legal college no longer. And I think 
 that a very large proportion of my contemporaries 
 were subsequently called to the Bar, though their 
 studies, or non-studies, had ceased to differ from 
 the same things elsewhere. I was of the tran- 
 sition : one who specialised in Law. 
 
 Besides " Ben " Latham, the Fellows in habitual 
 residence were two. And they were two of whom 
 crude undergraduate recollections are of infini- 
 tesimal value, considering their respective titles 
 to be remembered for what and by whom. For 
 one was Henry Fawcett, presently, in spite of 
 his total blindness, to be the University's first 
 Professor of Political Economy on a permanent 
 foundation, and subsequently Postmaster-General 
 — as everybody remembers, or at any rate knows. 
 
 78 
 
Henry Fawcett 
 
 He had won his high place among the Wranglers 
 only three or four years before my entrance, so 
 was still young in age ; but his robust good sense 
 and clear-cut, decided opinions, emphasised by 
 a downright, somewhat dictatorial manner, did 
 not give that impression. His total blindness 
 was obvious at once, and he was led about by 
 a lad who, I think, also acted as his reader. But 
 there was a manful defiance of his misfortune 
 which was obvious too. I do not think that he 
 drew round him any undergraduate circle : if 
 he did, it must have been very limited : but he 
 was certainly regarded as a prophet in his own 
 country — so to call ourselves — long before his 
 name became a household word (there are 
 Fawcett Clubs, as well as Gladstone Clubs, 
 still), and the household word an influence if 
 not a power. 
 
 The other was the mathematical lecturer : and 
 he was Leslie Stephen. I never attended a 
 lecture of his, not being in the mathematical 
 line. But I came to know him — as who of us 
 did not ? — quite well : that is to say, in my case 
 as well as an undergraduate who is shy and 
 reticent can know a Don who is reticent and 
 shy. Not that there was anything Don-like 
 about Stephen. No doubt his prestige as among 
 the most eminent founders of the Alpine Club, 
 
 79 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 and his enthusiasm for the river, were of signal 
 assistance to Latham in extending the attraction 
 of the Hall. The river indeed became a pas- 
 sionate kind of cult, with every member of the 
 college, from the Master down to the newly- 
 entered freshman, for a professed if not practical 
 votary. The rowing club and the college were 
 one and the same : its black and white colours 
 were worn as of course on the heads of men 
 whose hands had never grasped an oar, though 
 such hands were rare. I believe that even gyps 
 and bedmakers were not exempt from the infec- 
 tion. And the river had no rival. I do not 
 think that we cared for cricket ; football had 
 not yet left school, or golf St. Andrews ; lawn 
 tennis was still uninvented. So the boats, in 
 them or with them, were practically the sole 
 resource of those of us who were not expert 
 loafers, or satisfied by way of exercise with the 
 monotony of the Trumpington Road. 
 
 I am sure that our Dons were well advised in 
 encouraging the cult, even in its exaggerated form. 
 It inspired a healthy state of public opinion, 
 to the effect that a man who was not in the 
 running for a Tripos could still do something 
 for the honour and glory of the Hall, or, at 
 the least, take an eager interest in its honour 
 and glory. No college in Cambridge was so 
 80 
 
Leslie Stephen 
 
 saturated with the esprit de corps. The exag- 
 geration was shown in a slightly disdainful 
 attitude towards every other, as necessarily and 
 inevitably inferior to ours : there was even a 
 flavour of bad form, if not of actual disloyalty, 
 in having many acquaintances outside. There 
 was but a single migration during the whole of 
 my time : and it was regarded with an unaffected 
 wonder that such a thing could be. But the 
 exaggeration was harmless : the essential part 
 of it was sound and altogether wholesome : 
 and that part was pre-eminently represented by 
 Stephen. Speaking for myself, I never was in 
 a boat but once, and that was as bow of a scratch 
 pair, with an equally inexpert stroke, and a cox- 
 swain who, very early in the race, sent us into 
 a bank and out of the running. And I came to 
 have many out-college friends ; and have never, 
 I think, been much influenced by my surround- 
 ings of any kind. But "never much" does not 
 mean never at all : and for the influence of 
 Trinity Hall I had cause to be grateful. It drew 
 me more out of myself; it made me feel myself 
 one of a body to which I owed something for 
 its own sake as well as my own. It gave me 
 the definite purpose in which I had hitherto 
 been wanting. If I could not row, I could read : 
 and this substitution the tone of the place fully 
 G 8i 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 allowed. The great thing was to do something — 
 to row, preferentially, but something anyway. 
 I was certainly very far from Stephen's ideal of 
 a Hall man, or indeed of any man, for his ideals 
 were high : and not only so but, as everybody 
 who knew him knows, he lived up to them : and 
 this, no doubt, largely accounted for a more silent 
 and deeper influence than was due even to Alpine 
 and suchlike honours. But, though with so little 
 personal claim upon it, I found no short-coming 
 in his kindness, either then or thereafter. 
 
 It seems odd to remember Leslie Stephen, of 
 all men, as a preacher. But we had an occasional 
 sermon in chapel — once a year, or so : and it 
 was preached either by Latham or Stephen, who 
 held one of the clerical fellowships, and had not 
 yet resigned his orders as inconsistent with his 
 agnostic position. There was certainly nothing 
 parsonic about him, even then. My rather vague 
 impression and only recollection of the one or 
 two sermons of his that I heard is that he seemed 
 to be doing something against the grain, but as 
 well as he could, since it had to be done : that 
 they were shorter than was even yet usual, and 
 admirably composed. My only other remem- 
 brance of him in connection with the college 
 chapel is of an occasion when he read the 
 evening service to me, and I the lessons, as the 
 82 
 
Alsager Hay-Hill 
 
 scholar on duty, to him : not another soul being 
 there. Even under Latham's ruthless treatment 
 of old traditions, we were a very lay college still. 
 My opposite neighbour on the same attic floor 
 was a former schoolfellow, Alsager Hay-Hill. 
 I had hitherto known him only by sight and 
 reputation ; but here we soon became uncere- 
 moniously free of one another's rooms. Hill had 
 been regarded at Cheltenham as very much of a 
 madcap. He had a turn for practical joking, and 
 once had printed and posted all over the town an 
 announcement that at such an hour on such a day 
 the Rev. Charles Spurgeon would deliver an open- 
 air sermon in Sandford Fields on the text " What 
 came ye out for to see ? " The greatness of the 
 consequent crov.'d no doubt delighted Hill, but it 
 was probable that it did not come to see in him 
 the perpetrator of the hoax, or he might have had 
 a ducking in the Chelt that crawled conveniently 
 by. At Cambridge he was defiant of convention- 
 alities. He never, or very rarely, went near 
 the river ; his reading was, I should say, the 
 irreducible minimum required for getting through; 
 his out-college friends were legion. There seemed 
 to be nobody whom he did not know, and know 
 all about besides. Then — by way of crowning 
 eccentricity — he was a sonneteer of no ordinary 
 taste and skill. But, despite all his eccentricities 
 
 83 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 put together, he was popular, and no wonder, for 
 he was an always amusing companion, with a 
 keen sense of the ridiculous, and able to put him- 
 self at once on the best of terms w^ith anybody and 
 everybody in the whole wide world. He was by 
 no means a fish out of water, though not such a 
 fish as is bred by the water into which he had 
 strayed. But it was less strange to find him in 
 Trinity Hall than that he should be the son of an 
 old-fashioned Norfolk squire. Some time after 
 leaving Cambridge he transferred his energetic 
 attention from poetry to philanthropy, and may 
 claim to have been the pioneer of the Labour 
 Exchanges. He started, and personally con- 
 ducted, a "Labour Bureau" for the purpose of 
 bringing together employers and unemployed. 
 It was on too small a scale to be a permanent 
 success ; but the first practical attempt to solve 
 in this manner one of the most formidable in- 
 dustrial problems is certainly Hill's. 
 
 Meanwhile, it was in his rooms one evening 
 that he imparted to me a scheme of another kind. 
 This was the formation of a society of members 
 of all colleges who should meet in each other's 
 rooms in turn for literary discussion. Of course 
 there was no novelty in such a notion, which was 
 no doubt inspired by the historic precedent of the 
 Twelve Apostles. But our number was to be 
 
 84 
 
The Chit-chat Club 
 
 unlimited, for Hill loved literature, discussion, 
 and society, and could not have too much of any- 
 one of them ; and here we should have them all 
 together. So there and then we two constituted 
 ourselves the Chit-Chat Club, with "ETrea 
 TTTepoeuTa for a motto and, for a badge or device, 
 an Owl — that must have been the suggestion of 
 Jacob's quondam master, I feel sure. Another 
 reason of his for making his, now our, club as 
 wide open as possible was to counteract the self- 
 satisfied exclusiveness that characterised the 
 Hall. The curious thing about the project was 
 certainly not that it was thought of, but that it 
 succeeded. Hill knew many eligible members ; 
 before long our numbers threatened to become 
 inconveniently large ; and on my latest visit to 
 Cambridge, after some thirty years of absence, 
 I heard that it was actively flourishing still. But 
 I also gathered that its then remote origin had 
 become considerably blurred ; so I put it on 
 record for the benefit of any future archaeologist 
 who may undertake its investigation. Among 
 its early members was Henry Jackson of Trinity, 
 already mentioned in connection with my 
 memories of school. I remember the derisive 
 chuckle of the future Regius Professor of Greek 
 when somebody propounded the rash statement 
 that Edgar Allan Poe was, in addition to his 
 
 85 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 other merits, a great scholar. But we made 
 many rash statements when we were young : 
 possibly almost as many as when we are old. 
 
 On the same staircase, the tenant of the rooms 
 immediately under mine was Alfred Ainger — the 
 ugly little man with a voice in speech that must 
 surely have been bestowed upon him by a fairy 
 ofodmother in her most orracious mood. It was 
 indeed a veritable charm. It gained for the 
 quaint-looking and as yet unknown young man, 
 without impressive presence, personal influence, 
 or University honours, the Readership of the 
 Temple Church from out of a numerous body of 
 highly eligible candidates for that desirable post 
 as soon as the Benchers, fastidious and not 
 normally unanimous critics, were once brought 
 under its spell. It was virtually a matter of 
 course that one who could thus charm all hearers 
 should be chosen Master of the Temple on the 
 death of Dr. Vaughan : an office to which a 
 Canonry of Bristol added itself in the natural 
 sequence of things. I am very far indeed from 
 meaning to suggest that Canon Ainger, the fittest 
 biographer and editor of Charles Lamb as himself 
 a humorist of the same fine and subtle flavour, 
 and noted for his social as well as vocal charm, 
 was vox et presterea nihil. But his voice was his 
 fortune. Other men have been more favoured 
 86 
 
Alfred Ainger 
 
 by Fortune in their opportunities, and have made 
 the most of them to boot, and yet have had to be 
 content with the merit of endeavour. What I 
 mean is that he did not endeavour ; that I cannot 
 make the idea of effort fit into my recollection of 
 Ainger. A little rudimentary ambition would 
 assuredly have secured him high classical honours: 
 he was satisfied with an ordinary degree. I can- 
 not call his edition of Lamb a labour of love, 
 because to call a congenial pleasure a labour 
 seems a contradiction in terms. His cult of 
 Lamb, whom I thoroughly believe he knew by 
 heart, was the result, not of any mere literary 
 liking, but a genuine case of the inborn sympathy 
 of two minds whose outlook upon life made them 
 well-nigh one. The "gospel of work" was no 
 more Ainger 's creed than Lamb's. 
 
 Different indeed from these others of the four 
 occupants of our staircase was the tenant of the 
 rooms opposite Ainger's and below Hill's. For 
 it was " Bob " Romer, who was to be Lord 
 Justice Romer at no distant time. No flatter 
 contradiction to the popular notion of a future 
 Senior Wrangler can be imagined. He was no 
 mathematical monomaniac in spectacles revolving 
 problems even while taking his solitary grind 
 along the Trumpington Road. Romer by no 
 means scorned delights : and, so far as he must 
 
 87 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 have lived more or less laborious days, it was 
 without visible sigri of labour. He was some- 
 thing of a dark horse, though I do not suppose 
 that his carrying off the blue ribbon of the 
 mathematical course came as a surprise to his 
 trainers. You would take him, at first sight, for 
 a rollicking young fellow, careless of anything 
 but the moment, and winning instant liking by 
 good looks and high spirits. Nor would the 
 impression given by a second or third sight 
 differ much from the first, save that the first 
 liking would have grown. He could pull an 
 oar, wield a bat, and sing a song, took his part 
 in everything that was going on, and was a 
 thoroughly good fellow all round. There was 
 no more popular member of the Hall ; certainly 
 none more worthily so. I am sure that when 
 his name headed the list of Wranglers, our 
 pleasure in his success was fully as much personal 
 as corporate. Among the guests at the big 
 supper in the Combination room to celebrate 
 the occasion was his uncle, Mark Lemon, the then 
 editor of Punch. I thought he looked like it : 
 and also as if he were going to be as amusing 
 as, at that period, I supposed an editor oi Punch 
 bound by his very nature always and every- 
 where to be. Whether the promise given by 
 his Falstaffian figure and unctuous smile was 
 38 
 
" Bob " Romer 
 
 fulfilled, I was too far from the head of the table 
 to be able to tell. He did not seem to have 
 much to say, but he certainly smiled well — as 
 indeed well he might,' seated at a festival wherein 
 his own nephew and prospective son-in-law was 
 at once so popular and so central a figure. 
 
 Of sadder sort is my recollection of Bryan 
 Walker, high among the Wranglers of whom 
 Romer was senior, and high in the first class of 
 the classical tripos besides. If he did not scorn 
 delights, he at any rate shunned them : and I 
 fear that he lived not only laborious days but 
 laborious nights to follow. He seemed always 
 tired. His degree gained him a fellowship at 
 Corpus ; he lectured there, and, being ordained, 
 undertook the duties of a small Cambridgeshire 
 living at the same time. The last time I met him 
 was as his guest at the Corpus high table : and 
 I thought him something more than tired. Soon 
 after that the strain with which he had achieved 
 his success began to tell. His physician told him 
 that he must rest. " Doctor," he sadly answered, 
 "I can't: I don't know how." And then he died. 
 
 Meanwhile the unashamed idler was lazily 
 drifting towards his Canon's stall, and the man 
 who knew how to play as well as to work was on 
 the road that led him to the seat of a Lord Justice 
 of Appeal. 
 
 89 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 A very typical Hall man was Hughes, a 
 brother of " Tom " Hughes, who has been taken 
 by some to have been the original of the latter 's 
 Tom Brown. Unsubstantikl as such identifi- 
 cations almost always are, mere was certainly a 
 reminder in Hughes's modest manliness and 
 muscle of his brother's hero. He, also, died 
 much too soon ; in his case I suspect the strain 
 of the river as the cause. His last term being 
 my first I could not have much acquaintance with 
 him ; but I had some, for on my very first Sunday 
 morning in Cambridge he asked me to join him 
 and some half-dozen others in a cross-country 
 '* grind," a kindly attention to an unknown fresh- 
 man, pleasant to remember of him — though I 
 should add that the " grind " itself was rather 
 severe for the likes of me. R. A. Bayford, so 
 long eminent at the Probate and Divorce Court 
 bar, was also in his last term. For the opposite 
 reason, he being in his first term when I was in 
 my last, I have but little recollection of Sir 
 Charles Dilke, who might well have given 
 Trinity Hall a Prime Minister but for circum- 
 stances over which it cannot be said that he had 
 no control. All my first remembrance of him is 
 that once having instant and urgent occasion to 
 appear before some University official in cap and 
 gown, and not having my own at hand, I went 
 90 
 
Sir Charles Dilke 
 
 for a loan to the rooms nearest at the moment. 
 They chanced to be Dilke's, where I found a 
 pale and slender lad who proved gravely ob- 
 liging — yes ; pale and slender, despite all eye- 
 witness of those who knew the friend and pupil 
 of Gambetta in later times. And that little is all. 
 But it was not a little thing that those of his 
 contemporaries who did know him never lost 
 faith in him. It was after the scandal that put 
 him out of the running for the highest political 
 office that he was present at a banquet given by 
 the Master and Fellows to members and former 
 members of the college who had graduated 
 previously to a certain year. He spoke — in- 
 effectively, it seemed to me — but he had no 
 cause to complain of his speech's reception or 
 of his own. I sat next a County Court Judge 
 who had been of his year, had kept up an 
 intimacy with him ever since, and was convinced, 
 beyond the possibility of a doubt, that he had 
 been the victim of an atrocious conspiracy. I 
 have no opinion on the matter. My only know- 
 ledge of the Crawford and Dilke case is derived 
 from newspapers ; and opinions based upon con- 
 densed reports, however ably done, of trials 
 at which one has not been present, are of course 
 worth less than nothing. Worth a great deal, 
 however, are the opinions formed of a man by 
 
 91 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 his contemporaries as to what he will be and do, 
 not be and not do, at the age when character is 
 the most plainly legible. Dilke had the loyal 
 belief of the men who, themselves of the highest 
 sense of honour, had known him best and 
 longest, as well as of the lady whom he 
 married. 
 
 My most intimate college friend and daily 
 companion was Walter Scott Coward, afterwards 
 one of the ablest of H.M. Inspectors of Schools. 
 Nor did our intimacy cease with our comradeship 
 at Cambridge ; for, though our subsequent inter- 
 course was subject to long dormant periods, as 
 must needs be the case when the lines of life 
 diverge, it remained substantially the same for 
 nearly fifty years. We were recalling our old 
 times together only a few weeks before he died, 
 and so left me without the last unbroken link 
 between me and them. On leaving Cambridge 
 he had for some time been tutor to the eleven- 
 year-old son of Lord Blantyre, vi^ho had married 
 a sister of the Duke of Sutherland and was 
 consequently brother-in-law to the Duchess — 
 pre-eminently the Duchess, Queen Victoria's most 
 memorable Mistress of the Robes. One morning 
 master and pupil were relieving the monotony of 
 lessons in too noisy fashion to be aware, till too 
 late, of the entrance of the Duchess upon the 
 92 
 
Charles Kingsley 
 
 scene. " Mr. Coward," said her Grace, " I 
 believe that you were engaged to teach Greek : 
 not how to jump over chairs." He described the 
 majesty of her rebuke, all the more awful for its 
 calm, as making him wish that, instead of teach- 
 ing the art of jumping over chairs, he had learned 
 that of vanishing under them. 
 
 During my first year, Charles Kingsley was 
 appointed Professor of Modern History. The 
 choice of so imaginative a historian, however 
 brilliant and popular, for the chair, was not gener- 
 ally regarded as happy, especially as it was more 
 than suspected of being due to Court favour. 
 Cambridge, though she has bred so many poets, 
 from Chaucer to Tennyson, is nothing if not 
 prosaically and mathematically accurate where 
 accuracy is required. None the less, his inaugural 
 lecture in the Senate House was delivered before 
 an overflowing audience eager or curious to see 
 and hear the man whose influence had been a 
 very actual and active part of history indeed. As 
 the address, however, proceeded, the air unmis- 
 takably froze. His argument was, in effect, that 
 while human history is, in the main, a chain of the 
 inevitable consequences from more or less ascer- 
 tainable causes, yet that this general law fails to 
 act when some strong man comes to break the 
 chain. History, therefore, while to some extent 
 
 93 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 a science, is to a very much greater made up of 
 the lives of great men, as being a law to them- 
 selves. He may have been partially right : such- 
 like theories usually are. But he was sadly 
 unlucky in the comparison of his law of history 
 to the law of gravitation, which he declared to 
 be "suspended" when a ball is prevented from 
 falling to the ground by the interference of a 
 man's palm — as if it were not an unalterable law 
 of gravitation that enables the palm to interfere : 
 as if, had Newton caught the legendary apple in 
 his hat, the law of gravitation would have ceased 
 for one instant to act and be. I was not the only 
 auditor who, at this point of the address, noticed 
 Whewell's rugged features relax into a grim smile. 
 How far Kingsley fulfilled the promise of his 
 peroration to devote the rest of his life to the 
 teaching of history, and, if so, how numerously 
 or otherwise his lessons were attended, I never 
 knew. 
 
 As among the survivors of the some sixteen 
 hundred undergraduates who could claim to be 
 fellow-students of Edward VH., I wish it were in 
 my power, for my readers' sake, to provide them 
 with a good dish of fresh gossip about the then 
 Prince of Wales. I have not a morsel ; and I 
 much doubt if anybody has more — any, that is to 
 say, worth cooking. Everybody knows how and 
 
 94 
 
A Royal Undergraduate 
 
 under what watchful guardianship he lived at 
 Madingley — which is not Cambridge : how speci- 
 ally he was lectured : and how the real life of the 
 place was represented for him by a few acquaint- 
 ances of his own college, Trinity, not chosen by 
 himself, but carefully selected. Among these I 
 can recall two — the Duke of St. Albans, because 
 his nobleman's ijold tassel and of"own to match 
 were seen about a good deal : and a nephew of 
 the Master of Trinity (Whewell at that date), 
 because he was my own schoolfellow Frederic 
 Myers. But he cannot help me in this matter 
 because, first, I cannot imagine him as capable 
 of gossip ; secondly, because, if such a thing 
 were imaginable, our sets, and I may say our- 
 selves, were so far apart that our intercourse was 
 not long in dwindling down to virtually none. 
 
 They could hardly, however, differ more than 
 the outward and visible Cambridge of these days 
 differs from the Cambridge of those. The dingy 
 debating room of the Union had to be looked tor, 
 and perhaps found, in a sort of mews. What is 
 now the principal residential quarter was then a 
 tract of open fields, dividing the quite distant and 
 isolated railway station from the town. The 
 colleges, in their architecture and arrangements, 
 were still as they had ever been within the 
 memory of their oldest members. There was no 
 
 95 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Girton or Newnham : the female student was 
 absolutely unknown. The married Don had 
 just become possible, but had not yet begun to 
 be actual. Of course there were some Heads 
 of Houses, Professors, Lecturers, Officials, 
 " Coaches," and others of classes not hitherto 
 bound to celibacy who had wives, and, presum- 
 ably, some of these had daughters ; but their 
 womankind was so little in evidence as to be 
 practically non-existent. It was quite feasible for 
 a man to live the whole life of Cambridg^e without 
 becoming personally aware of the existence of 
 any sex but his own — out, that is to say, of the 
 May term : and then the merely temporary in- 
 vaders represented all that the life of Cambridge 
 was not, before the whole spirit of the place had 
 been subjugated by academic Eve. As the op- 
 posite of a misogynist, I will take for granted 
 that the new life is better than the old. But to 
 those of us who lived the old purely masculine 
 life, what is called " Cambridge " is not Cam- 
 bridge, but a brand new University under a 
 delusive sameness of name. 
 
 Every story must needs be new to somebody. 
 So for the benefit of such somebodies I will recall 
 one lady of my own time who was not a nobody, 
 inasmuch as she was conspicuously handsome. 
 She was the wife of the unromantically named 
 
 96 
 
Beauty and the Beast 
 
 editor of Euclid, Potts : and he was, beyond any 
 comparison, the very ugliest man I ever saw. 
 " I can't understand," said he, " why we should 
 be known as Beauty and the Beast. I have 
 always considered Mrs. Potts to be distinctly 
 good-looking." The story merits remembrance 
 as an instance of that rarest of rarities — wit 
 without a sting. 
 
 H 97 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 In Hall and Chambers— The Berryer banquet: Brougham 
 and Cockburn — Gray's Inn — Rushton v. Campbell — An 
 inefficient volunteer — Evenings in Mitre Court — " Atalanta 
 in Calydon " — " Agag " Stott — Faiiatici per la musica 
 
 Having secured an unshared first class in the 
 Law Tripos, and consequent election to one of 
 the three Law Studentships already mentioned 
 among the legal specialities of Trinity Hall, I 
 beean life in London as one of the three or four 
 pupils of Charles Pollock, a son of the then Lord 
 Chief Baron, and himself afterwards a Baron of 
 the Court over which his father had presided. 
 The son used to complain of the difficulty of 
 keeping up an acquaintance with a father who 
 invariably rose before five in the morning, and, 
 after a day of judicial duties, was in bed by nine. 
 Those were the days of special pleading ; and 
 Charles Pollock's sound and solid practice neces- 
 sarily included the science said to have required 
 for its assimilation an insatiable appetite for saw- 
 dust sandwiches without butter. While lodging 
 in the still untransformed Bloomsbury of earlier 
 memories, and attending his chambers in Child's 
 
 98 
 
In Hall and Chambers 
 
 Place, a long-demolished cul de sac adjoining 
 Middle Temple Lane, I completed my course of 
 dinners at Gray's Inn. There was as yet no 
 compulsory examination of candidates for the 
 Bar, a year's formal attendance at two courses 
 of lectures — attendance by no means necessarily 
 implying attention — being accepted as an alterna- 
 tive ; and this, as the line of least resistance, I 
 elected to follow. But the eating of so many 
 dinners in Hall was, of course, as essential a 
 preparation for the right to wear a two-tailed 
 wig then as now. The procedure was only more 
 reminiscent of a barbarous age ; for the dinner 
 hour was still five, and port was the only 
 beverage throughout the meal. In all serious- 
 ness, however, the only excuse for a scoff at the 
 notion of eating oneself into a profession is its 
 tempting ease. Nothing is more important than 
 the cultivation of a common professional atmo- 
 sphere. And I suppose no true Englishman will 
 deny that this is better achieved in the free and 
 friendly friction of the dinner-table than is any- 
 wise possible in the lecture room or examination 
 hall. 
 
 It seems rather a leap ; but the mention of 
 dinners in general leads to that of a very big one 
 in particular, as belonging to my student period — 
 the banquet given by the English Bar to the 
 
 99 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 great French advocate Berryer. Students as 
 well as barristers were admitted among the hosts 
 of the occasion : and my presence enables me to 
 give the exact words of a seldom accurately 
 quoted passage in the speech of Sir Alexander 
 Cockburn. Lord Brougham had declared the 
 whole duty of an advocate to be to his client 
 only, without recognition of any other, public or 
 private ; to fight with all his might for his client's 
 victory, and for that alone, regardless of however 
 injurious, however unjust, to the rights, interests, 
 and reputations of others the consequences of 
 the battle might be. I am not presenting his 
 contention a whit too strongly ; for that matter, 
 Brougham's view of the ethics of advocacy is 
 pretty generally known. And the battle was to 
 be conducted, he proclaimed, " Per fas aut per 
 nefas " — by any means, fair or foul. " Yes," 
 retorted Cockburn, who followed, " Per fas sed 
 non per nefas ; with the sword of the soldier — not 
 with the dagger of the assassin." I can hear the 
 words now, in the very voice that sent them ring- 
 ing down the hall. And I am glad to remember 
 the applause with which they were acclaimed. 
 
 Gray's Inn was then a very small Society ; but 
 it was thus the more sociable. Our resemblance 
 to a family party, wherein everybody knows 
 everybody, was certainly not the less complete 
 100 
 
Gray's Inn 
 
 for a certain, or rather uncertain, propensity to 
 quarrels. Why we quarrelled, or what about, I 
 was never able to tell ; and I am sure that my 
 inability was generally shared, especially by the 
 parties to the squabbles. Did the propensity 
 come from drinking port through dinner, and 
 frequently after dinner too ? Or from our large 
 proportion of Irish students in comparison with 
 Lincoln's Inn or the two Temples? We were 
 not behindhand even with these orreat Societies 
 
 o 
 
 in the matter of our traditions. Was not Bacon 
 of us — did he not habitually walk in the garden 
 overlooked by his chambers ? Did not Shake- 
 speare — ominous conjunction of names ! — produce 
 "A Midsummer Night's Dream," its first per- 
 formance, in our Hall ? So we piously believed. 
 Were not the tables at which we dined made 
 from the timber of the Great Armada ; and was 
 not " The glorious memory of good Queen Bess," 
 their donor and our constant benefactress, solemnly 
 and ritually honoured as the only toast of grand 
 day? Did not our roll of worthies comprise 
 Chief Justice Gascoigne, Stephen Gardiner, Philip 
 Sidney, Lord Burleigh, the three Archbishops, 
 Whitgift, Laud, and Juxon, Chief Justice Holt, 
 Samuel Romilly — whose name, by the way, was 
 represented still, both among the benchers and 
 the students. Among the Masters of the Bench 
 
 lOI 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 were the two future judges, Huddlestone and 
 Manisty. The incisive voice of the former 
 started talking with the "Amen" of the grace 
 before meat, and sounded over the hall without 
 a moment's cessation till he retired with his 
 fellow-benchers into the Parliament Room, where, 
 I doubt not, it started again. To get in a 
 mouthful edgeways must have been a feat re- 
 quiring no little skill. 
 
 Among the students of my time, none will 
 fail to remember the almost painfully spare 
 figure of William Lowes Rushton, the Shake- 
 spearean enthusiast who claimed to have antici- 
 pated Lord Campbell in demonstrating, from 
 the internal evidence of the plays, that their 
 author was a lawyer ; Campbell being an un- 
 scrupulous plagiarist of Rushton. There was no 
 suggestion of the Baconian heresy, which must 
 have been in its early infancy, if yet born ; 
 William Shakespeare the dramatist and William 
 Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were not 
 yet suspected of conspiracy to perpetrate the 
 silliest hoax on record. I think that Rushton 
 was entitled to claim against Campbell priority 
 of publication of their common argument, that 
 only a lawyer could have employed legal techni- 
 calities, frequently abstruse and unlikely to occur 
 to a layman, with the accurate familiarity dis- 
 102 
 
Rushton V. Campbell 
 
 played in the Shakespearean plays. Plagiarism, 
 however, is another affair. It is quite on the 
 cards that Campbell had never seen or heard of 
 Rushton's articles on a probability likely to occur 
 to any legal mind. As to the probability itself, 
 a learned King's Counsel has gone far to de- 
 molish it by showing that while legal knowledge 
 is conspicuous in the plays, equally conspicuous 
 in them is legal ignorance. The whole question 
 cannot matter much. The plays are still and 
 always the plays, even if more than a single hand 
 went to their making. And though it mattered 
 supremely to Rushton, even to the point of 
 rendering him a fanatic with a grievance, its im- 
 portance to him arose from a sincere and whole- 
 hearted enthusiasm for the plays themselves — a 
 whole-hearted sincerity by no means normally char- 
 acteristic of controversies concerning their author. 
 He knew them by heart — meaning all that " by 
 heart" can in its first and fullest sense imply. 
 
 Nor was his enthusiasm exclusive. It ex- 
 tended, by an obvious enough process, from 
 Shakespeare to music, and, perhaps yet more 
 obviously, to patriotic duty. Enthusiasm is not 
 necessarily contagious, but it is none the less 
 compulsive for that ; and, one day, a casual 
 meeting with Rushton in Lincoln's Inn ended 
 in his carrying me off to be forthwith enlisted 
 
 103 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 in the corps popularly known as the Devil's 
 
 Own. My reminiscences of that corps can be 
 
 recorded very concisely indeed. I certainly 
 
 attended, though with constantly lessening zeal, 
 
 a very few drills for raw recruits on the terrace 
 
 of Lincoln's Inn garden. The next step (to the 
 
 goose's) was to find the whole business a bore, 
 
 to be postponed to a next time that somehow 
 
 never came. I never procured a uniform or 
 
 handled a rifle ; and the next proceeding was 
 
 to forget that I was even so much as nominally 
 
 bound to qualify myself for effective service to 
 
 my Queen ::nd Country. Nor was it till years 
 
 later that I was disagreeably reminded of my 
 
 forgotten duty by the receipt of an application 
 
 for the payment of my subscriptions to the corps, 
 
 by that time fallen into formidably and — as is 
 
 invariably the way in such cases — inconveniently 
 
 long arrear. I paid : and I resigned. I am 
 
 certainly not going to make excuses for not 
 
 having done what I had voluntarily undertaken 
 
 to do. But I do think it would have been better 
 
 for myself, morally as well as physically, if I had 
 
 been obliged to make myself effective under 
 
 some stringent system. And, not being an 
 
 exceptional person in any way, I may safely 
 
 take it that what would have been better for 
 
 me would, in the same way, have been better 
 
 104 
 
Friends at Grav's Inn 
 
 
 for some thousands more whose momentary 
 flicker of miHtary spirit was too faint to grow, 
 without some fanning from without, into even the 
 feeblest flame ; and better, by those thousands, 
 for their native land. I do not suppose that 
 I should have made a notably efficient " terri- 
 torial " ; but, at the very least, we must all have 
 attained to some minimum of efficiency in any 
 such force had it existed for us — we, the absolutely 
 inefficient volunteers. 
 
 Chief among the friends for whom I had to 
 thank Gray's Inn was Ben Thomas Williams, a 
 Welshman from the Welsh part of Pembroke- 
 shire, in after years a Queen's Counsel and 
 County Court Judge. One of my first dinners 
 in hall during my first student's term was on 
 the occasion of his call ; I had then, though 
 still a painfully shy schoolboy very much at sea 
 among strange waters, somehow made his 
 acquaintance. No doubt the " somehow " was 
 his own kindly good nature. In him, on my 
 return to Gray's Inn hall, I found a ready-made 
 friend. But I must part from him for the 
 present, for his full and proper place in my 
 memory is in connection with later events — if 
 such a word may be introduced into such 
 uneventful remininiscences as these. Among 
 Trinity Hall men in London I found my 
 
 105 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 former opposite neighbour Alsager Hay-Hill, 
 who, together with a brother in the Audit Office, 
 occupied a set of chambers in Mitre Court, 
 adjoining the Temple. They were on the top- 
 most floor of a very tall building, inspiring a 
 visitor in wintry weather, at a moment when 
 the fire happened to be low, to complain, in 
 the words of Tennyson's CEnone, of 
 
 Height and cold, the splendour of the Hills. 
 
 But the cold was but an accident of the minute, 
 speedily remedied ; and the irremediable height — 
 I forget how many steps one had to climb — was 
 no " object," as an advertiser would say, to the 
 lungs and limbs of Hill's friends and acquaintance, 
 who seemed as numerous in London as they had 
 been in Cambridge. At any rate, whenever I 
 made the ascent of a Friday evening, when he 
 was always at home, his room was sure to be 
 full of men, some habihtds, some there for the 
 first time ; for next to an old friend he liked 
 a new one. In fact those Friday evenings in 
 Mitre Court became a social institution for the 
 indulgence of talk at ease and at large. 
 
 Literature and Art were our principal topics ; 
 and there was much to be said of both in the 
 first half of the 'sixties. Whistler, for instance, 
 was a chronic bone of contention ; and William 
 io6 
 
Evenings in Mitre Court 
 
 Cosmo Monkhouse, the afterwards eminent art 
 critic, Hill's most intimate habitii^, was one of 
 the painter's vanguard — or forlorn hope, as many 
 of us would call it then. Monkhouse — by way 
 of parenthesis — was then chiefly known among 
 his circle not as the critic by nature, but as a 
 poet by industry, relieving his week-day labours 
 at the Board of Trade by devoting his Sunday 
 mornings to versification. The visible result 
 was a little volume which did not bring him 
 fame, but was as respectably "minor" as the 
 pleasure of production could make it, and more 
 than merely respectable here and there. I do 
 not think he would take my criticism amiss now 
 any more than he used to take it then. But the 
 great event of those years was of a nature that, 
 I venture to say, would be absolutely impossible 
 now ; nay, that I cannot hope to make a later 
 generation even dimly comprehend. It was 
 nothing less than an outburst of popular exulta- 
 tion, not over some sensational achievement in 
 sport or finance, but over a new poem by one whose 
 very name was unknown save to a small group 
 of Oxford men. Who was this Swinburne, whose 
 " Atalanta in Calydon " had, all of a sudden, 
 without previous puff or prestige, taken the 
 entire public by storm? The "Atalanta," and 
 its author, were the topic of the day, and of 
 
 107 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 many days. I am pretty sure that if a new 
 George Eliot were to publish a new " Adam 
 Bede " her novel might, if ably engineered, be 
 talked about for its nine days or so a little more 
 than its weekly swarm of rivals ; but throw a 
 whole nation into excitement — No. Yet not 
 even Sherlock Holmes got such a grip of the 
 public mind in 1892 as Adam Bede in 1859. 
 " Adam Bede," however, was, after all, a novel. 
 But for a poem ; a dramatic poem ; a dramatic 
 poem on a classical theme, and in classical form 
 to boot, with an unknown name on its title-page, 
 to win instantaneous fame — that is what is so 
 utterly incomprehensible now, but was a fact then. 
 I have seldom known the satisfaction of being one 
 of a majority. But there was no possible minority 
 even of a single voice, when one evening in 
 1864, still remembered as if it were yesterday, 
 I, with my brother, who then shared my lodgings, 
 and another habitud of Mitre Court, feasted 
 together on " Atalanta in Calydon." 
 
 Of this third at our feast I intend to make 
 mention at some length, not because I can expect 
 his name to excite the slightest preliminary in- 
 terest, but because these pages will be and remain 
 the sole record of one who was extraordinarily 
 interesting in himself, and should, and might, 
 have left no inconsiderable mark upon his time. 
 108 
 
^'Agag" Stott 
 
 And, as nobody knew him so intimately as I, 
 it is the more pious a duty to attempt his rescue 
 from perpetual but unmerited oblivion. I have 
 previously expressed my belief that some fairy 
 godmother must have bestowed upon Alfred 
 Ainger a christening gift against which no hostile 
 influences, from within or without, should ever be 
 able to prevail ; a charm needing for its working 
 no effort of his own. On the like theory, George 
 Stott, of whom I now speak, was assuredly a pre- 
 eminently helpless victim of that more familiar 
 malignant fairy whose gift, according to the leg- 
 ends of her race, neutralises all her sisters' favours. 
 I never knew anything definite of his early life, 
 except that it had been passed in Bristol, and 
 that he had been received into the Catholic 
 Church at the age of sixteen. That was a mis- 
 fortune from every point of view ; for it was 
 clearly a case of those impulsive and immature 
 conversions that are more likely than not to be 
 followed by a reaction. Reaction did follow, and 
 that strongly. By the time that I first saw his 
 frail-looking figure, with the disproportionately 
 large head, the sombre complexion, the Oriental 
 cast of features, and the chest wholly covered 
 by a magnificent black beard, I doubt if he 
 retained a fragment of his temporary creed. At 
 the sarne time he us^d to bewilder plain minds 
 
 109 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 by his contention that though he, George Stott, 
 had outgrown faith, as logically untenable, the 
 universal dominance of the Church of Rome was 
 the imperative need of this hopelessly illogical 
 world. He would, in mixed company, when the 
 talk turned upon such matters, so champion 
 Loyola and the counter-Reformation as to render 
 himself liable, at the period of Newdegate and 
 Whalley, to the suspicion of being a Jesuit in 
 disguise. I think it rather pleased him to convey 
 such an impression, for he thoroughly enjoyed 
 mystifying those whom he regarded as Philistines. 
 (Is that mid-Victorian term of contempt, imported 
 from Germany, for persons on whom our own 
 lofty intelligence looks down as stupidly and 
 incurably narrow-minded, still in common use ? 
 It seems to have passed out of print long enough 
 to have passed out of meaning.) But mystifica- 
 tion is always a dangerous game, unless played 
 with consummate tact — of which Stott had not a 
 particle. For, with all his apparent complexity, he 
 was really as simple, and, to those whom he failed 
 to mystify, as transparently simple, as a child. 
 
 He had entered St. John's College, Cambridge : 
 and had he remained there would probably have 
 done well, for he was a good scholar. But his 
 fastidious taste — or, shall I say, that malignant 
 fairy ? — impelled him to migrate to Magdalene ; 
 no 
 
Stott's College Career 
 
 him, a man with no means to spare, to what was 
 at that time essentially a rich man's college ; a 
 man to whom a good degree was imperatively 
 necessary from studious and economical St. John's 
 to a small college no less distinguished — of course 
 I am speaking of now ancient history — for the 
 opposite qualities. And thereupon ensued 
 another error. From out of all the classical 
 " coaches " in Cambridge he selected Calverley. 
 No doubt Charles Stuart Calverley, of Christ's, 
 was the most brilliant of them all, as nobody can 
 need to be told. It was not, however, a wit, 
 a humorist, a man whose own brilliancy could 
 take care of itself without trouble and presume a 
 like ability in others, that his pupil required, but 
 a tutor of the exacting sort, who would spare 
 neither them nor himself in getting the best and 
 utmost out of his men. A financial strain, inevit- 
 able under such conditions, brought him to seek 
 literary or tutorial work in London without being 
 able to wait for a degree. Some of his surviving 
 Cambridge contemporaries, who would be some- 
 what older than mine, may perhaps recollect 
 " Agag" Stott, so called because something about 
 his gait on King's Parade seemed suggestive of 
 the King of Amalek, who "came delicately." 
 It is on record that Calverley once laid a wager 
 that he would get fastidious and elaborately 
 
 III 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 attired Stott of Magdalene to promenade that 
 same parade, on a given day, at its most 
 frequented hour of the afternoon, carrying a 
 cabbage. It seemed impossible that he should 
 win ; but the tidings of the bet had spread abroad, 
 and at the given hour of the appointed day the 
 Parade was thronged. Punctually to the time, 
 " Agag " Stott picked his way through the 
 throng, ostentatiously holding a cabbage in both 
 hands. Calverley had hedged by betting Stott 
 that he would not carry a cabbage along King's 
 Parade. 
 
 When I knew him he was reviewing fiction 
 for the Echo, under the editorship of Arthur 
 Arnold, and more general literature for the 
 Economist under that of Walter Bagehot ; and 
 on the establishment of the Graphic he was 
 engaged in the former capacity there. Between 
 the first and last of these services he was 
 appointed editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, but 
 was back in London within a little more than 
 a year. There again I think I see the malignant 
 fairy's hand, for he was not merely no man 
 of business ; he was incapable of realising that 
 a newspaper has to concern itself with other 
 matters than literature and philosophy, and that 
 even these have their indispensable business side. 
 But though not intended by Nature either for 
 
 112 
 
Stott as a Reviewer 
 
 an editor or for any other position demanding 
 energetic and decisive action, a more able or 
 trustworthy reviewer there could not be. No 
 doubt he had more time, in our more leisurely 
 days, than he could have found in these for 
 ensuring to every book that came to him the 
 justice of a thorough reading, with a thorough 
 thinking over to follow ; but, as myself a reviewer 
 both of those days and of these, I may have 
 more to say on this subject before I have done. 
 Nor was his thinkinor confined to his current 
 work. Thought was his business, precisely as 
 it had been Hobbes of Malmesbury's. The com- 
 parison never occurred to me till this moment ; 
 but it is peculiarly apt, in so far at least as both 
 were mainly occupied with the same class of 
 questions, and were entirely alike in the logical 
 severity of their conclusions. And here I come 
 to the sadness of the whole matter — that one 
 whose thought was at once so subtle and so 
 sincere, so well based on wide reading and yet 
 so independent of its base, should have left 
 behind him — Nothing. He had a notion of 
 some day writing a history of his opinions — it 
 must have been interesting, as the story of the 
 making of a mind, and otherwise of critical 
 and perhaps philosophic value. But it was never 
 begun, and, I am quite sure, never would have 
 I 113 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 been begun even had he been alive to-day. He, 
 as it were, evaporated in talk, seldom eloquent, 
 but always lucid, vigorous, and overflowing with 
 fresh suggestion. And it was really talk, not 
 monologue, for he rejoiced in a well-fought 
 battle : well-fought-out too, for a talk that had 
 begun, say, with dinner at the Cock (the historic 
 and Tennysonian Cock : not its modernised con- 
 tinuation over the way) or the Solferino in Soho, 
 might continue till past sunrise, and then be not 
 ended but adjourned. 
 
 Our arguments were by no means always of 
 a serious order, however seriously conducted. 
 They were often of the nature of the " Quod- 
 libets " ; the questions with which the disciples 
 of the Schoolmen used to amuse their ingenuity. 
 If we never tackled the celebrated, if supposi- 
 titious, example of what such a thing might be, 
 " How many angels can dance upon the point 
 of a needle ? " it was certainly not because of its 
 being outside the range of our speculations. 
 Poetry, too, came in for a great deal of talk, 
 and Browning, in especial, had no more thorough 
 devotees. Music, however, ran all else very hard 
 indeed. We were not the least in advance of 
 our times. While we believed whole-heartedly 
 in the eternal supremacy of Beethoven, whom 
 we held to be Music's utmost and final utterance, 
 114 
 
Fanatici per la Musica 
 
 we had a truly mid- Victorian passion for the 
 Opera of our mid-Victorian time. Scarcely a 
 week passed, during the season — then a regular 
 period, from Easter till when the grouse sum- 
 moned Parliament to rise — that did not, once 
 at least, find us patiently suffocating in the 
 abominable atmosphere that led to the gallery 
 of one or the other of the two houses, and 
 thinkinof it well worth while. Well — it was 
 worth while, since we found it so. Being neither 
 musician nor musical critic, I am not qualified 
 to compare the present state of things with what 
 prevailed previously to the great Wagnerian 
 revolution, then only just beginning to cast its 
 shadow — or should I say its light ? — before. But 
 I cannot imagine that the most passionate music- 
 lover of the most intellectually advanced school 
 could, in the way of sincere enjoyment, surpass 
 us who knew nothing better than an opera of 
 Mozart, or Donizetti, or Rossini, or Bellini, or 
 Gounod, or Verdi, conducted by Costa or Arditi, 
 and rendered by such singers — to name a repre- 
 sentative few — as Titiens, Lucca, RudersdorfiC 
 Trebelli ; Giuglini, Graziani, Faure. It was the 
 music and its performance, and nothing else, that 
 had got into our heads when once, after hearing 
 Titiens as Fidelio, we walked on and on, and 
 talked on and on, without note of distance, 
 
 115 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 direction, or time, till seven o'clock the next 
 morning suddenly brought us to our senses in 
 an unknown and rainy region that we found to 
 be Blackwall. Of the singers who had been the 
 favourites of an earlier time, Alboni, Grisi, and 
 Mario still survived. But Mario was in the 
 second stage of what had been said of him — 
 that " while he could sing he couldn't act, and 
 when he could act he couldn't sing." I am 
 certain that on one occasion — I think it was in 
 " Le Prophete " — he merely went through the 
 form of opening his mouth, moving his lips, and 
 extending his arms, without emitting a sound : 
 yet the applause of the ever-faithful British 
 audience could scarcely have been greater even 
 in his ibest days. One does not always need 
 corporeal ears in order to hear. My only recol- 
 lection of Grisi is a sad one. She had been 
 ill-advised enough to attempt a return to the 
 stage which she had quitted for many years : 
 and I was ill-advised enough to hear her. It 
 was in " Lucrezia Borgia." Not a trace of what 
 had given her fame remained : and it was pitiable 
 when, in the last act, her corpulence prevented 
 her from rising from her knees without far too 
 obvious aid. And the audience was not so 
 faithfully kind to her Lucrezia as it had been 
 to Mario's John of Leyden. 
 Il6 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Oxford Circuit— Walter John Huddleston— J. J. 
 Powell — Henry Matthews — Dr. Kenealy — Quarter 
 Sessions 
 
 Called to the Bar in due course, I became an 
 inmate of chambers in Pump Court, Temple, 
 shared by the present Sir Arthur Collins, late 
 Chief Justice of Madras, and my friend B. T. 
 Williams, already mentioned in connection with 
 Gray's Inn, to which Collins, already a leading 
 junior on the Western Circuit, also belonged. 
 I joined the Oxford Circuit, of which Gloucester, 
 next to Stafford, is the principal Assize town. 
 
 The leading wearers of silk at that time were, 
 facile princeps, Huddleston, afterwards Baron 
 Huddleston, and J. J. Powell. The Junior Bar 
 was exceedingly strong, for it included Henry 
 James, afterwards Lord James of Hereford ; 
 Henry Matthews, afterwards Viscount Llandaff, 
 and sometime Home Secretary; J. O. Griffits, 
 whom I mention here not for the high place 
 he held in the esteem and confidence of solicitors 
 as a sound and able lawyer, but for his singular 
 
 117 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 habit of wearing full evening dress, apparently 
 always brand-new, everywhere and at every 
 hour of every day ; Macnamara, also a favourite 
 Counsel of the sound and solid order ; Montagu 
 Williams, who might fairly be called the Prisoners' 
 Attorney-General, so extensively, and so success- 
 fully, was he employed in their defence at the 
 Old Bailey and elsewhere. No doubt his subse- 
 quent success as a police magistrate was largely 
 founded on his speciality at the Bar. He was 
 no mere lawyer — I doubt if Macnamara or 
 Griffits would have allowed him to be a 
 " lawyer " at all ; but I am unable to follow him 
 into the theatrical world where he was the most 
 thoroughly at home. It was curious to compare 
 his position in the criminal courts with the face, 
 figure, and even manner of just a good-natured 
 and good-tempered boy. Among my slightly 
 senior contemporaries was Mr. Justice Jelf: Mr. 
 Justice Darling and Lord Loreburn did not 
 become members of the Circuit till too late for 
 any memory of mine. 
 
 Every Circuit has, as most people know, a 
 social as well as a professional side : and our 
 Bar Mess had in Huddleston an almost ideal 
 Senior. His loquacity, already noted, and his 
 open vanities — he liked to know dukes, and to 
 have it known that he knew them, and after his 
 Ii8 
 
Walter John Huddleston 
 
 promotion to the Bench married a duke's 
 daughter — might excite a smile. But it would 
 be a kindly smile, in sympathy with a kindly 
 nature. I thoroughly believe that he not only 
 wished but tried to make everybody round him 
 happy and comfortable. Some of us, between 
 Court and Mess, were walking with him a little 
 out of Stafford when we passed another of us 
 walking alone, " unfriended, melancholy, slow." 
 It was a very recently elected member of the 
 Mess, without any ready-made acquaintance, and 
 too evidently uncouth and shy to be likely to 
 
 make his own way. " How is it that is all by 
 
 himself?" asked Huddleston, to whom solitude, 
 as implying silence, would appeal as a dire 
 calamity. " Hasn't he any friends among us ? 
 No ? Then we must give him some." And I 
 am not more sure that I am writing these words 
 than that he took the first opportunity of saying 
 
 something kindly to in a markedly familiar 
 
 way, for others to see and hear. 
 
 Powell, his opponent in ordinary, was also his 
 opposite in nearly all ways save in kindliness of 
 nature. And in that respect there was a differ- 
 ence. Huddleston certainly liked to be liked 
 for his kindliness ; Powell, I should say, was 
 wholly unconscious of any such desire. I am 
 only noting an obvious difference — not in any 
 
 119 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 way giving the preference to instinctive over 
 deliberate kindliness, or vice versa. He was 
 entirely without affectation. He was of a humble 
 origin which he never either flaunted after the 
 manner of some self-made men, or concealed after 
 that of others : and it was understood, to his 
 honour, that when in Gloucester at Assize time 
 he never neglected the kinsfolk above whose 
 heads he had climbed. As an advocate, he was 
 apt to suffer from loss of temper — a fault from 
 which Huddleston was wholly free ; but it was 
 the natural defect of his zeal for his cause. That 
 he spared no pains, and left as little to chance 
 as chance ever allows to be left, whether in 
 war or in law, I once had uncomfortable ex- 
 perience. We lodged in the same house on the 
 College Green, and our bedrooms adjoined. He 
 was next day to appear for the Crown in a trial 
 for murder ; and he spent the whole night in 
 rehearsing his opening speech to the jury with 
 such rhetorical energy that he robbed me of my 
 night's rest as well as himself of his own. It was 
 an odd sensation to hear repeated in Court next 
 morning, verbally and literally, the final revision 
 of the speech from which I was still suffering. 
 Huddleston, however, who defended, gave me 
 my revenge. 
 
 If I were bidden to name the ablest man I ever 
 120 
 
Henry Matthews 
 
 met, I should not hesitate to fix upon Henry- 
 Matthews, who, as Viscount Llandafif, passed 
 away a few months ago in his eighty-eighth year. 
 And in that choice for a first place I should be 
 far from alone. But if I were bidden to name 
 the ablest man I ever knew, I should hesitate 
 much and long: for I strongly doubt if he was 
 really known by anybody at all. Below all his 
 geniality there was something — I know not what — 
 that seemed to refuse intimacy ; and in the per- 
 ception of that something, whatever it was, I am, 
 again, far from alone. It was like a perpetual 
 " Thus far thou shalt come, but no farther." 
 That he was unsurpassed as a fully equipped and 
 accomplished lawyer few will question ; and his 
 equipment was not confined to English law. As 
 an achievement in advocacy, his reply for the 
 petitioner in the Crawford case was, according to 
 all accounts and reports, a masterpiece of vic- 
 torious invective. But he was not conspicuously 
 successful on Circuit for sfettinof verdicts from 
 common juries. His subtleties of argument were 
 apt to fly over their heads ; he made no appeal 
 to their feelings, like James ; he lacked the per- 
 sonal impressiveness of Huddleston ; and so far 
 from sharing the red-hot zeal of Powell, his 
 manner suggested an indifference to the result, as 
 if his interest in his client was limited to pre- 
 
 121 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 senting the client s case in a flawlessly logical 
 way. " Matthews addresses a jury as if he were 
 asking it for a dance," was a comment I once 
 heard. And the comment was not inapt, though 
 it may seem hazy here. But one does not dis- 
 parage a racehorse because . . . Well, I have 
 too much respect for the common jury, and too 
 much admiration for the special ability of those 
 who do know how to influence it, to continue the 
 comparison to its customary end. 
 
 I suppose I must not forget Dr. Kenealy, as in 
 some request when a slashing speech rather than 
 prudent strategy or scrupulous fairness was what 
 a case required. It is difficult, if possible, to 
 deprive one's mind of the light of after events in 
 an attempt to revive previous impressions ; but I 
 do not think that his conduct of the Tichborne 
 case came upon those who knew him as much of 
 a surprise. I am now disposed to describe him 
 as genius gone wrong ; partly perhaps through 
 too thorough an acceptance of Lord Brougham's 
 conception of the whole duty of an advocate — 
 to win his client's cause per fas aiit per nefas : 
 by fair means if he could, but if these were not 
 available, then by foul. Brougham, one may 
 hopefully assume, did not carry out his doctrine 
 to the whole of its practical conclusion. Indeed 
 he has been charged with the inconsistency of 
 122 
 
Dr. Kenealy 
 
 thinking less of a client's interests than of his own 
 glory : notably in kis conduct of a cause cdlebre, 
 the trial of Queen Caroline. And that, in this 
 world of mixed motives, might well have been 
 the case with Kenealy, specially when helped by 
 some twist of the brain. Does the reader chance 
 to have ever come across that piece of wild work, 
 his " New Pantomime".-* If so, no further ex- 
 planation of " genius gone wrong " will be 
 required. He was, moreover, not only a fine 
 classical scholar, but a master of the principal 
 modern and Oriental languages. I am not, how- 
 ever, suggesting that much learning had made 
 him mad : the mental twist would have been 
 earlier than the learning. I think he must have 
 become a half-convinced monomaniac towards the 
 close of his career, deliberately employing the 
 unconvinced part of his own brain in bewildering 
 the brains of others. One is ashamed to remem- 
 ber the national nightmare known as the Tich- 
 borne claim, turning old and intimate friends into 
 enemies, dividing families, populating lunatic 
 asylums, and outraging common sense at every 
 point and turn. I was once at a large mixed 
 dinner party where a clergyman actually pro- 
 pounded this amazing thesis : The evidence in 
 favour of the claimant to the Tichborne estates is 
 stronger than the evidences of Christianity. But 
 
 123 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Christianity is true : therefore all the more is the 
 identity of the claimant with Roger Tichborne 
 true. It was certainly not without cause that I 
 spoke of Kenealy as bewildering other brains 
 than his own. Of course it may be suggested 
 that this particular parson cannot have had any 
 brains to bewilder. But the suggestion would be 
 wrong. 
 
 At the City (of Gloucester) and County Quarter 
 Sessions, both of which I regularly attended, the 
 ordinary leaders were Pickwickianly named 
 Robert Sawyer, a good fellow who, in mid- 
 career, inspired by all a convert's zeal, threw up 
 a sound and steady practice at the Bar in order 
 that he might devote himself to the teetotal 
 cause ; and George Griffiths, a successful defender 
 of prisoners, who possessed the invaluable art of 
 talking to twelve Gloucestershire jurors as if he 
 were just one of themselves — accent and all. 
 When he became totally blind, he still stuck to 
 his practice at Assizes and Sessions, mastering 
 his briefs by having them read to him — a feat 
 which must be well-nigh unique in professional 
 annals. He was not notorious for polish, and 
 was certainly no respecter of persons : he would 
 address the future Lord James of Hereford as 
 "Jim" ; and I have heard him invite Huddleston 
 himself, the associate of dukes and duchesses, to 
 124 
 
Quarter Sessions 
 
 drop in for a Sunday's pot-luck vvith'him and the 
 missis whenever in London and so disposed. A 
 propos of both pot-luck and teetotalism together — 
 it was customary for the Bar to dine with the 
 Magistrates one evening during the County 
 Sessions, One of the latter prided himself on his 
 skill as a brewer of punch ; and on one of these 
 occasions, at any rate, he displayed it by sub- 
 stituting ale for water. Not a drop of the feebler 
 fluid would he allow. The result was much 
 admired — at the time. That no wig covered a 
 headache in Court next morning I dare not 
 surmise. 
 
 125 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 "The Just Judge"— The Laiv Maonzine—Mhs Cobb- 
 Andrew Johnson's oath — My first story — John Blackwood 
 — The value of a name 
 
 My fee-book, still extant after nearly half a 
 century of chance and change, tells me that at 
 no time during my active connection with the 
 Bar could I describe myself as briefless; that my 
 fees during my first year amounted to seventy- 
 one pounds and eight shillings, and during my 
 second to ten guineas better. But then happened 
 what — in itself a sorrow — gradually and in- 
 directly, though not slowly, diverted my course 
 of life into directions of which I had never 
 dreamed. 
 
 I have not yet given my father a prominent or 
 frequent place in these memories. But I must 
 recall him now, and with affectionate pride. I 
 long ago mentioned him as among the first- 
 appointed County Court Judges. His Circuit 
 was extensive, comprising the three important 
 towns of Gloucester, Cheltenham, and Stroud, 
 eight other Courts in the same county, and one 
 126 
 
" The Just Judge " 
 
 in Wiltshire, thus involving a considerable amount 
 of journey by road as well as rail. The twenty 
 miles from Cheltenham to Stow-on-the-Wold, 
 for instance, high up on the table-land of the 
 Cotswolds (said to be the highest market town 
 in England), had to be travelled by road ; and, 
 until antiquated notions of time and distance 
 were, in company with other things, smashed up 
 by the motor-car, twenty miles were twenty miles. 
 I used to think them more, crawling, as most of 
 them did, through a scarcely inhabited expanse, 
 monotonously grass-green or snow-white accord- 
 ing to the season, and diversified only by stone 
 walls, with an occasional belt of Scotch firs planted 
 here and there to break the sweep of the wind. 
 During his nineteen years of judicial office I do 
 not think that my father once, unless by reason 
 of some unavoidable accident, kept a Court wait- 
 ing : absence through illness I do not remember 
 at all. Nor during all those same nineteen years 
 of dealing with an annually increasing variety of 
 cases was there an appeal to the Superior Courts 
 from any decision of his, save once ; and then the 
 appeal was dismissed and the decision confirmed. 
 Confidence in the soundness of his law was 
 unbounded, and was amply justified by the 
 scrupulous care with which his judgments were 
 formed. In questions of fact his anxiety for 
 
 127 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 justice was literally proverbial, for it caused him 
 to be popularly known as "The 'Just Judge"; 
 and a nobler title than that is not to be conceived. 
 My brother and I frequently accompanied him on 
 his journeys ; and I sometimes grew impatient 
 with the way in which he would hear out what 
 appeared to me a transparently clear case to the 
 last word that either party could find to say, or 
 extricate the most trivial-seeming dispute from 
 the most hopeless-seeming tangle. He was 
 never in a hurry, never lost his temper, even with 
 the most irritating witness, thought highly of the 
 judicial office, and unaffectedly maintained its 
 dignity. Speaking of the County Court Judges 
 generally. Chief Justice Erie, I have been told, pro- 
 nounced the opinion that "some of them ought 
 to be sent up among us," the Judges of the 
 Superior Courts — " Francillon for instance." 
 
 In the summer of 1866, he, my mother, my 
 brother, my sister, and myself were making a 
 vacation tour together when he succumbed to 
 an attack of cholera at Ouchy, and was buried 
 at Lausanne. The cloisters of Gloucesu.T 
 Cathedral contain a window, the tribute of the 
 officials of his Courts to his memory. I shall not 
 dwell upon the nature of our journey home. 
 That can be imagined by any reader as readily as 
 it can be recalled by me. I will leave blank the 
 128 
 
Income and Expenditure 
 
 few months that elapsed before my mother and 
 sister joined me in lodgings in London. 
 
 The last ten words are one consequence of a 
 serious curtailment of our united means ; for 
 those of my mother and sister were no more than 
 they needed, and I had none whatever beyond 
 what I might earn. It is true that my fee-book 
 to date was not altogether discouraging. But 
 the expenses of two or three Circuits and eight 
 distant Quarter Sessions every year, the necessary 
 share of chambers and a clerk in London, plus all 
 the hundred-and-one minor expenses — not minor 
 in the aggregate — that practice at the Common 
 Law Bar demands, rendered it exceedingly un- 
 likely that income could balance expenditure for 
 many years to come. It did not occur to me to 
 throw the Bar over and seek my fortune elsehow 
 and elsewhere. I had been trained for the Bar 
 almost from my cradle ; I was my father's son ; 
 all the ambition I ever had was bounded by, all 
 my associations had for years been bound up 
 with, the Bar. I am wrong, though. I did 
 make one effort to change my spots by applying 
 for an Inspectorship of Schools. I am fairly 
 confident that I should not have made a bad 
 Inspector, and had a sufficiently good academic 
 record ; but no doubt there were many with a 
 K 129 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 better, as well as a more influential connection 
 with the official world. At any rate my other 
 attempts to make Fortune my friend were, while 
 more consistent with the way to the Woolsack, 
 no less immediately barren. The Law Magazine 
 was then in a parenthetic state between its past 
 and its present successes. Its proprietor, a 
 member of the Oxford Circuit, carried it on less 
 for profit than for the sake of what is called 
 Social Science ; Lord Brougham's National 
 Association for the Promotion of Social Science 
 was still well alive and prominently in view, and 
 among its most active and eminent organisers 
 was the proprietor of the Law Magazine. The 
 editorship falling vacant, I stepped into it on the 
 exceedingly speculative terms that my remunera- 
 tion was to consist of the whole of the annual 
 profits, if any : of nothing, if none. I must have 
 been extravagantly sanguine to enter, without the 
 slightest editorial experience, into a bargain of 
 which the very terms were based upon the un- 
 likelihood of turning stagnation into healthy 
 circulation within a year. I do not think that my 
 proprietor had much reason to complain when, at 
 the end of twelve months, he had incurred 
 through my editorship the loss of something 
 between two shillings and half-a-crown. 
 
 In fact he did not complain. He saw quite 
 1^,0 
 
The Law Magazine 
 
 clearly that, while he had no objection to losing 
 half-a-crovvn a year for Social Science's sake, 1 
 could not atford, even in such a cause, to work 
 without a living wage. The work, however, 
 besides being useful as experience, had not been 
 without interest of the non-financial kind. There 
 were my contributors, who also worked for nothino- 
 but with a good will, and in the sincere belief that 
 his or her article in the Laiv Mamzine would 
 have weight with the world. An editor can exer- 
 cise but an imperfect authority over unpaid con- 
 tributors, but I got on very well on the whole 
 with mine. I do not think that Miss Cobb was 
 among them, but it was in this connection that 
 I occasionally met her, remembering her not 
 acccording to her merits as a social reformer or 
 to her distinction as a journalist, but only a comely 
 and more than plump lady with a more than 
 plump little spaniel in whose ways and welfare she 
 seemed to take a warmly affectionate concern. 
 I am sure that she made one creature as happy 
 as she desired to make all. Dudley Field, the 
 American lawyer and orator, was, when in 
 England, another member of the same circle. 
 There was a scandalous belief current that 
 Andrew Johnson, at that time President of the 
 United States in succession to Lincoln, was an 
 habitual drunkard, and had even taken his 
 
 131 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Presidential oath in a state of intoxication. The 
 latter charge Field, who had been present and 
 knew him well, told me was obviously and pain- 
 fully true. But why? Just because he was one 
 of the most abstemious of men. The excitement 
 of the occasion had sent into his inexperienced 
 head the unaccustomed priming of a glass of 
 champagne. Field's was first-rate evidence, and 
 I record it in case any future historian should 
 repeat the charge. 
 
 My next search for a professional back-door 
 was no less futile. B. T. Williams introduced 
 me to William Henry Michael, of his Circuit, 
 who had undertaken a new and up-to-date edition 
 of Jacob's Law Dictionary, and required a " devil." 
 A "devil," as just possibly some lay reader may 
 not know, is the forensic term for one who does, 
 or helps to do, another man's work, with or 
 without a share in the pay. Michael's career 
 had been singularly out of the common. He 
 must have been more than fifty years old when 
 he threw up a large and lucrative medical practice 
 at Swansea, got himself called, and stepped at 
 once into a larger and more lucrative practice at 
 the Parliamentary Bar. For six months I plodded 
 at Jacob, and had mastered the whole law and 
 doctrine of Accord and Satisfaction, when the 
 undertaking came to an end. Michael found he 
 132 
 
My First Story 
 
 had no time and attention to spare — indeed, I 
 always wondered that a man with such an amount 
 of profitable business on his hands from the very 
 first should ever have given a single thought to 
 Jacob. 
 
 Here I think I hear an impatient reader ask, 
 " But why not take to coaching, or journalism, 
 or reporting, or other of the methods by which 
 many afterwards successful barristers have enabled 
 themselves to tide over their lean or even wholly 
 barren years ? " Well — after two such years I did 
 take to something of the kind. It was George 
 Stott, himself coaching and journalising, who 
 suggested that I might utilise the magazines. I 
 thought not. My only contributions to literature 
 (if literature they could be called) up to the end 
 of 1867 had been a couple of short poems (I call 
 them such by courtesy) in Once a Week, and a 
 couple of articles and a number of book notices 
 under my own editorship in the Law Magazine. 
 But, in deference to my friend's arguments, 
 having nothing better to do, and seeing nothing 
 before me but penniless failure, 1 thought there 
 could be no harm in courting a failure the more. 
 The experiment by which I expected, almost 
 intended, to convict my adviser of error, took 
 the form of a story. I had never tried to write 
 a story in my life before, and cannot tell what 
 
 X33 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 induced me to do so then. Nor can I recall any 
 such excitement over it, any such artistic glow, 
 as is usually recorded in such cases. It was 
 written in quite cold and common ink, and sent 
 to Blackwood in cold, nay, frozen, certainty of 
 its return. I knew nothing more of "Maga" 
 than everybody knew, and chose it for my ex- 
 periment because that little was more than I 
 knew of any other. When it came back upon 
 my hands I intended sending it the whole round 
 till it should have been rejected everywhere. 
 The process would not cost much, and nobody 
 would be able to say that I had not tried. But 
 it did not come back. Instead of my manuscript 
 promptly came a letter from John Blackwood 
 himself, speaking of " Grace Owen's Engage- 
 ment " in such complimentary terms that I had 
 to read them many times in order to make sure 
 that they were applied by a great editor to a 
 story of mine, and — it was then April or May, 
 1868 — fixing its appearance in two numbers for 
 the July and August following. " Grace Owen " 
 paid me sixty pounds on her first appearance, 
 and twenty more when her story was reprinted 
 in "Tales from Blackwood"; so that my first 
 short story brought me in almost exactly as much 
 as my best year at the Bar, and without any 
 absorption by Circuit expenses, chamber rent, 
 
 134 
 
My First Full Novel 
 
 and so forth — with none but of a few pence by- 
 ink, paper, and pens. No wonder that I wrote 
 a second without delay ; and this, in three parts, 
 brought in, only a few months later, a further 
 ninety pounds. During the next year I con- 
 tributed to " Maga" a serial story in six numbers, 
 presumably (I had not begun account-keeping) 
 at the same rate of pay ; in the next, another 
 story in two numbers, and my first full novel, 
 " Earl's Dene," published in the three-volume 
 fashion of the time, in 187 1. 
 
 Under these circumstances I fear that my 
 estimate of John Blackwood may be suspected 
 of personal colour. For this I should be sorry 
 indeed. Not that I should fear such suspicion 
 on the part of any who knew him, for their 
 estimate would unanimously coincide with mine. 
 During those first three years of my connection 
 with "Maga" I came to know him well, and 
 the better I knew him the higher my estimate 
 of him rose. He represented the traditions of a 
 o-reat House with a srreatness of his own. One 
 of the finest of literary critics, he was also the 
 most independent, never letting his judgment of 
 a work be influenced by its author's prestige, 
 however high. He had, too, the courage of his 
 judgnients, thinking less of what the reading 
 public was likely to like than of what he con- 
 
 135 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 sidered it ought to like, and acting accordingly ; 
 a perilous principle for a business man without 
 the critical faculty and foresight, but with him, 
 having both, almost infallible. No doubt the 
 anonymity sacredly observed in " Maga " under 
 his rule tended to render its readers to an 
 appreciable extent his accomplices in this matter. 
 It compelled judgment of its contents upon 
 their merits, unprejudiced by their writers' names. 
 The power of a popular name over the popular 
 mind was once made the subject of a deliberate 
 experiment. Anthony Trollope, at the height 
 of his vogue, wrote a novel entitled " Linda 
 Tressel," which Blackwood published anony- 
 mously. It fell as flat as — a pancake (I cannot 
 think of a more original comparison) ; whereas, 
 had it issued with the name of Anthony Trollope 
 on the title-page, there can be no question of 
 what the result at that time would have been, 
 even had its merits — not conspicuously great — 
 been less than they were. 
 
 I was his guest at Strathtyrum, his house at 
 St. Andrews, one summer, and came to the con- 
 clusion that next to golf, if next, his principal 
 pleasure was the discovery of a writer who 
 showed promise of any sort that seemed worth 
 cultivation. He was unsparing of critical counsel 
 in such cases ; and did not cease to bestow it 
 136 
 
John Blackwood 
 
 even when an author had "arrived." His corre- 
 spondence must have been enormous ; how he 
 managed to deal with it, always under his own 
 hand, and at the same time with the mass of 
 manuscripts that never failed to receive full and 
 prompt attention no less at Strathtyrum than in 
 George Street, and yet had ample leisure from 
 breakfast to bed-time for golf, for conversation, 
 and for the entertainment of his guests, was a 
 mystery, until I learned how he spent the very 
 late night and the very early morning. He 
 spent them, I fear, only too arduously, for he 
 was not quite sixty-one when he died in 1879. 
 I have just been looking through the press notices 
 of him collected for private circulation by the late 
 William Blackwood, his nephew and successor. 
 In the course of my own notice, reprinted from 
 the Globe, I find myself speaking of him as " the 
 very type of justice and generosity," and as a 
 man of a remarkable personality who " may be 
 regarded as almost, if not quite, the last and by 
 no means the least worthy among the publishers 
 of an old school who were much more than men 
 of business, and reached the height of success 
 by breadth of view, and by a principle of belief 
 that in the world of books authors are fully as 
 important as buyers." 
 
 I would willingly quote myself further ; but I 
 
 T '^'* 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 have said enough to show how my friendship 
 with John Blackwood stands out prominently 
 among the best of my memories, and why there 
 is none that I prize more. 
 
 138 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 France after Sedan — Tracking a King — A suspected spy— 
 At Meaux — At Lagny— Cool head and light heart — At 
 Versailles 
 
 Blackwood's judgment of every work submitted 
 to him solely upon its own merits, independently 
 of authorship, friendship, or any other considera- 
 tion, had been pre-eminently illustrated by his 
 historic refusal of George Eliot's " Romola " ; 
 and I think that the warmest admirers of her 
 previous work would now accept his apparently 
 unbusiness-like decision as, from the purely 
 literary standpoint, right and wise. I had there- 
 fore no cause to complain of my first experience 
 of rejection in such a quarter and in such good 
 company. Among the victims to Blackwood's 
 critical impartiality was my " Pearl and Emerald," 
 which, however, at once found a comfortable 
 home in the Covjihill, and was afterwards pub- 
 lished by Smith & Elder in a single volume 
 with Du Maurier's illustrations. 
 
 I never gave up the Bar ; nor can I say that 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 the Bar gave up me. It was not a case of 
 divorce, or even of settled separation ; but as 
 my new occupation came to take up more and 
 more of my thoughts and my time, so did my 
 profession come to occupy them less and less. 
 I cannot say definitely when my description as 
 a practising barrister became a legal fiction, for 
 there was in fact no such definite time. I 
 cannot remember any attendance at Assizes or 
 Sessions after the beginning of 1871, though 
 that may not have been actually the last ; but 
 I do remember the January Sessions of that 
 year, because of much Franco- Prussian war-talk 
 in the robing-room ; and I had recently seen 
 something of what Invasion means. 
 
 That experience happened in this wise. In 
 the course of September 1870, the London 
 representative of the New York World was 
 rendered anxious by the sudden cessation of 
 letters or other messages from its correspondent 
 at the German Head Quarters, and was in a 
 hurry for an emissary who would look up the 
 missing man, and act as his substitute mean- 
 while. I suppose there was not a war corre- 
 spondent of competent experience then to be 
 found in all London ; every man of them was 
 already employed. He had to put up, in short, 
 with anybody who might be ready and willing 
 140 
 
Tracking a King 
 
 to start at once on so vague a mission, and there- 
 fore with my inexperienced self for want of a 
 better. A common acquaintance, a journalist, 
 whom he had asked to help him find what he 
 wanted, and who had failed in other quarters, 
 brought us together ; and in no longer time 
 than was needful for getting my passport and 
 otherwise putting myself e7i regie, I was on my 
 way to Ostend in the sudden capacity of repre- 
 sentative of a great newspaper at the seat of 
 a great war, but without any plan beyond reaching 
 the German Head Quarters without delay. 
 
 That was easier to undertake than to do. 
 Where was the King of Prussia (not yet German 
 Emperor) likely to be found ? Belgium could 
 not tell, nor could the neighbouring North 
 of France — though for the latter "could" one 
 ought perhaps to read " would," seeing that a 
 foreigner in haste to reach the German lines 
 could not fairly count upon Frenchmen to speed 
 him on his way. At last I made up my mind 
 to make for Meaux, and managed, in spite of 
 confused and broken communications, to reach 
 Senlis. Thence to Meaux had to be by way 
 of Dammartin. I reached that place also, and 
 found it so completely occupied by the Prussians 
 that, literally, not a French inhabitant was visible, 
 man, woman, or child. But for the foreign 
 
 141 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 soldiery it was an absolutely deserted town. 
 Referred to the Commandant for leave to proceed, 
 I was quite courteously but, in spite of my 
 credentials and explanations, quite firmly ordered 
 to go back again. Nor, of course, did I have 
 from him any hint of where or how to find the 
 King. There was absolutely no thoroughfare ; 
 so there was nothing for it but to return to 
 Senlis, where I was presently accosted by two 
 official-looking persons, who required me to 
 give an account of myself before — was it Monsieur 
 le Maire ? I have forgotten the title of the 
 functionary in question, but Monsieti}' le Maire 
 will serve. 
 
 There was considerable awkwardness in the 
 situation. A spy had short shrift ; and suspicion, 
 if it once spread beyond official control, was 
 practically identical with summary conviction. 
 I could not but realise that a certain amount of 
 suspicion was not without good ground. Monsieur 
 le Maire, assisted in his investigation, as it 
 seemed to me, by a court composed of any 
 citizens who had any advice to volunteer, was 
 quite aware of my visit to Dammartin. Either 
 I had been under surveillance, as an unplaceable 
 stranger, or the man who had driven me there 
 had informed the authorities of my expedition, 
 and of my private interview with the Prussian 
 142 
 
Suspected as a Spy 
 
 Commandant besides. Senlis is not far from 
 Dammartin, and a knowledge of the resources 
 of a town of the importance of every town in 
 the eyes of every good townsman might be of 
 signal service to an advancing foe. My explana- 
 tion, I fear, went but lamely. I am not fluent 
 in any language — not even in my own — and my 
 French, over and above its stumbling uncouth- 
 ness, is, even to my own ear, infected with a 
 noticeable German twang, presumably caught 
 from my Alsatian and Thuringian teachers. My 
 credentials consisted of a Foreign Office pass- 
 port in the ordinary form, and a certificate, 
 signed " L. Israels, Chief of World Staff of 
 Correspondents," to the effect that I was one 
 of the latter. That by " the World" was meant, 
 not this "great globe itself— yea, all which it 
 inherit." but only a New York newspaper, did 
 not prove easy to make clear, even with the 
 help of the attempted explanation that the Press 
 of America in general, and of New York in 
 particular, is a recognised Power, and that the 
 Grande Nation had no more sympathetic well- 
 wisher than the New York World. My argu- 
 ments fell flat. I saw for myself that even if I 
 were a credible witness on my own behalf, the 
 sympathy of a newspaper could be but of little 
 moment when the Prussians were within a few 
 
 143 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 hours of Senlis ; and was I a credible witness, 
 professing myself a British subject with one 
 breath and an American journalist with another ? 
 The tribunal could not reasonably be expected 
 to trust my own translation of the documents 
 that I laid before it, and these were written 
 in a tongue that might be English, as I asserted, 
 but might be any other — French excepted. I felt 
 that things were going badly for me, when a 
 brilliant thought struck Monsieur le Maire. It 
 seems that there was a reputed English scholar 
 in Senlis ; a messenger was sent for him, and, 
 after a little delay, a good-looking young fellow 
 appeared who, after a promiscuous consultation, 
 took charge of the inquiry. Like my credentials, 
 his first question might have been English ; but 
 certainly not " English as she is spoke " in its 
 native land. Presumably, however, he asked for 
 my story, which I accordingly repeated in the 
 simplest English that I could contrive, he looking 
 gravely from me to my credentials and back 
 again meanwhile. I do not believe that he 
 understood an appreciable fraction of what I 
 said. But no doubt his repute as a linguist 
 was at stake — on no other ground, at any rate, 
 can I account for my discharge under circum- 
 stances that would have quite reasonably 
 warranted my detention at least, if nothing 
 144 
 
At Meaux 
 
 more decisive. Espionage was in the air ; and 
 when that happens, one knows what is apt to 
 happen besides. My dismissal was accompanied, 
 not with any apology, but with a strong recom- 
 mendation to quit Senlis without any avoidable 
 delay. 
 
 Perhaps it was the knowledge of this authori- 
 tative counsel, combined with an argument of 
 my own that is seldom if ever known to fail, 
 that induced the innkeeper with whom I had 
 lodged the nio^ht before to forward me to Meaux 
 by a roundabout route so as to avoid Dammartin. 
 Indeed, so expeditiously was this arranged, and 
 such the civility that surrounded me at Senlis 
 between my arrest and my departure, as to 
 suggest that my double anxiety to reach Meaux 
 without the knowledge of the Prussian Com- 
 mandant at Dammartin, while it did not white- 
 wash me from the suspicion of espionage — nothing 
 ever does that when it has once started — might 
 argue that it was on the French instead of the 
 Prussian side. Had such a possibility been 
 hinted by the English scholar whose report had 
 such an evident bearing on my discharge ? 
 
 I reached Meaux, by help of a network of 
 forest roads, without interruption, and found no 
 difficulty in obtaining from the Staff Commandant 
 there the necessary sauf-coiidtiit. There, too, 
 
 L 145 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 I learned what, if I had only been lucky enough 
 to have left London a very little earlier, would 
 have given me a fine topic for a first news-letter — 
 the Crown Prince's occupation of Versailles. As 
 things were, that historic event had become stale 
 during my efforts to reach Meaux through a 
 newsless land, though, since my first arrival at 
 Senlis, Versailles had never been more than a 
 crow's flight of forty miles away. It was much 
 as if, during an invasion of Britain, one should 
 travel round London from Ware to Maidstone 
 in blank ignorance that Windsor had been 
 occupied by the invader before one's own journey 
 had begun. I do not think anything so much 
 impressed me with the reality of invasion as the 
 conversion of the Cathedral into a hospital for 
 foreign soldiers and native prisoners of war. 
 There was plenty of Red Cross work at Meaux. 
 And one felt the grip — one could not but feel it — 
 of the German hand upon the whole place, as 
 afterwards one felt it wherever the hand had 
 fallen. It is not a cruel hand — nay, it is by 
 nature a kindly one. But it is a merciless hand 
 when mercy stands in the way. My impression 
 of the invading army was as of some dispassionate 
 force, never going out of its way to be cruel, 
 never going out of its way to spare. 
 
 I would willingly have lingered at Meaux for 
 146 
 
At Lagny 
 
 the sake of the novelty of its atmosphere ; but I 
 was King-hunting, so my paramount duty was 
 to track my quarry down, and to make up so 
 far as might be for all vexatious delays. King 
 William had left Meaux, and was now at the 
 Rothschild chateau of Ferrieres, near Lagny. 
 So to Lagny I proceeded, and there emerged 
 from utter isolation by a casual encounter with 
 one Daniel, a Virginian, acting at Head Quarters 
 for another New York paper. It was a great 
 relief, for among all the legion of war-corre- 
 spondents I had not, so far as I knew, a single 
 acquaintance, was entirely without introductions, 
 and, having come out so late, was new to my 
 business among a swarm of proficient rivals. I 
 mention the matter, however, on account of a 
 certain puzzling incident. One evening we sat 
 down, in a state of thorough sobriety — that point 
 is of importance — to write our respective news- 
 letters, each aided by nothing more intoxicating 
 or narcotising than a single bottle of light beer, 
 which I had procured from a cabaret close by. 
 I had written about half my letter and consumed 
 about half my beer when all my faculties became 
 literally paralysed by a heavy drowsiness against 
 which I could not even try to contend. All I 
 further remember is a very late next morning of 
 violent headache after more than ten hours of 
 
 147 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 lethargy, and finding Daniel suffering even more 
 acutely from precisely the same attack, with 
 precisely the same symptoms as mine. There 
 lay both our unfinished letters, and there stood 
 our equally unfinished beer. Did that cabaret 
 keep a special brew for Prussians ? And had I 
 been taken for one, as at any rate not a French- 
 man — especially if I am right in thinking that my 
 French accent has a German flavour ? 
 
 There was not much to be learned from a 
 daily tramp or drive to Ferrieres, King William 
 with Bismarck beside him and Moltke opposite 
 was a familiar object ; but he never once stopped 
 his carriage in order to impart exclusive infor- 
 mation to the New York World. All the use 
 I could make of my temporary position on that 
 organ was to introduce myself to " Billy " Russell, 
 who, as everybody knows, was the recipient and 
 distributor of the confidences of Head Quarters 
 — that is to say, just so much of them, and just 
 so far, as Head Quarters might deem politic to 
 please. The once intractably independent hero 
 of the Crimea received me with all the courtesy 
 due to the journal I represented, but of course had 
 to let me know that, while there was no harm 
 in asking for better opportunities of service, 
 granting them, or getting them granted, was out 
 of his power. In fact, I did not expect anything, 
 148 
 
Sighting the Stars and Stripes 
 
 and so was scarcely disappointed. But I was 
 naturally interested by an interview, though but 
 short and barren, with Russell of The Times. 
 
 So little was to be got by hanging about 
 Ferrieres, Head Quarters though they were, that 
 Daniel and I decided to transfer our own quarters 
 from Lagny to Versailles, as the military capital 
 during the siege. I think it was during that 
 journey — for we had made some episodic excur- 
 sions meanwhile — that we sighted the Stars and 
 Stripes displayed from the roof of a chateau. 
 The sole inhabitant proved, on a visit, to be 
 a young ultra-gallicised American, one or two 
 members of whose family had been conspicuously 
 to the fore at the Court, and especially at the 
 Court-balls, of Napoleon III. He now sat in the 
 wreck of what had evidently been a highly and 
 expensively decorated drawing-room ; for, as he 
 told us, Prussian soldiers had recently been 
 quartered there, and, though not at all bad 
 fellows, had, through racial gaucherie, ignorance, 
 and indifference to the furniture as well as to the 
 feelings of others, done a good deal of smashing. 
 They certainly had ; the proverbial bull in the 
 china shop could not have done more. Our host 
 could not even offer us chairs. But the Prussians 
 had left the grand piano fairly sound ; so while 
 we sat upon something, he sat upon something 
 
 149 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 else and entertained us with Offenbachian airs. 
 It was like listening to a ghost of the times before 
 Sedan. There is a conventional tradition that 
 the Americans are an eminently cool-headed and 
 the French an eminently light-hearted people. 
 The general truth of the tradition by no means 
 bears the test of observation. But at any rate 
 never could cool head and light heart have been 
 more closely united than in that young fellow, 
 American by birth, French by adoption. 
 
 It was my fate to be in Versailles during the 
 least eventful period of the siege, roughly speaking 
 between the sortie of General Vinoy and the 
 beginning of the bombardment, while negotia- 
 tions were still pending. Of what was going on 
 in Paris of course we knew nothing ; in greater 
 France little beyond the rumours of the restaur- 
 ants — which, by the way, must indeed have had 
 a quite abnormal experience of the good blown 
 by an ill wind, so constantly were they thronged 
 and so plentifully supplied. Our occupation 
 mainly consisted in trying to get hints and ink- 
 lings of where might be the likeliest chance of 
 seeing something during the day, or rather the 
 unlikeliest of seeing nothing, and putting our 
 fellow news-hunters off any scent that we fancied 
 might be worth following. We were engaged 
 in business, in which generosity must needs give 
 
 150 
 
At Versailles 
 
 place to justice — ^justice to ourselves. I cannot 
 say that I was sorry, either for myself or for the 
 World, when my service came to an end. 
 General Sheridan paid a visit to Versailles, and 
 naturally every American in the place lost no 
 time in interviewing, or trying to interview, that 
 illustrious American soldier. I say "trying" to 
 interview : for, as an American for the nonce, 
 I found myself one of a crowd of journalists at 
 a sort of informal lev^e, and I had not been an 
 American long enough to have acquired more 
 push than I have by nature — which is none. 
 After the formal handshake I was reduced to 
 silent speculation on the pronouncedly Mongolian 
 type to which the General's features belonged. 
 But I did better than that, after all : for, by over- 
 hearing the name of "Maclean" pronounced 
 close by, I discovered what had hitherto been the 
 proverbial needle in the pottle of hay— the verit- 
 able, though vanished, correspondent of the New 
 York World. I forget the reason for the 
 stoppage of his correspondence ; anyhow, he was 
 as ready to resume the duties of his post as I to 
 resign them. 
 
 One need not have seen a small fraction of a 
 battle— and no human eyes, though aided with 
 the best of field-glasses, can see more — in order 
 to realise victorious invasion. I did realise it, in 
 
 151 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 many a ruined and deserted village, or half empty 
 and wholly demoralised town ; at the sight of 
 troops of homeless peasants, women mostly, con- 
 veying, as best they could, their young, their old, 
 their infirm, and other burdens without conjectur- 
 able goal or aim ; in the general epidemic of 
 helpless dejection ; among the swarm of nonde- 
 script and cosmopolitan speculators who followed 
 in the invader's wake for whatever pickings might 
 be found. My homeward route was along the 
 main line of the German advance ; and not a 
 returning train but bore its freight of wounded 
 men. No : one need not see the fighting to see 
 something, nay much, of war. 
 
 My very last visit to Paris was two years later, 
 when the work of the Commune was still plainly 
 to be seen, and the City of Light had not even 
 yet recovered from its gloom. I did not catch a 
 smile on even a British face when a French 
 guide, showing a party of tourists round Notre 
 Dame, pointed out the spot where — according to 
 him, though not to history — Archbishop Darboy 
 had perished "praying for his Executors." I felt 
 quite disappointed that he did not add " Adminis- 
 trators and Assigns." 
 
 152 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 The Globe in the early 'seventies— Dr. Mortimer Granville 
 — "Tom" Purnell, ultivms Bohemorum — John Churton 
 Collins 
 
 My journalism at home had hitherto been repre- 
 sented by some half-dozen " social " leaders in 
 the Echo and the Star, edited respectively by 
 Arthur Arnold and John Morley. Shordy, how- 
 ever, after the Franco- Prussian episode my legal 
 career was brought practically to an end by an 
 engagement, requiring daily attendance at the 
 office, to write "Notes of the Day" for the 
 Globe. The editor of that paper, Dr. Mortimer 
 Granville, had not yet succeeded in raising it to 
 the position that it reached during his reign and 
 afterwards maintained ; but he made one feel 
 that he was not the man to fail, though it would 
 have been exceedingly difficult to state a reason 
 for so hopeful an impression. He was the most 
 unknowable person that I ever knew (I am 
 conscious of the bull) ; notwithstanding our daily 
 relations, he was as much a mystery at the end 
 of them as at the beginning. All that we of his 
 
 153 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 staff knew, or thought we knew, of his previous 
 history was that he had practised medicine some- 
 where in the provinces ; of his present life, 
 nothing. He seemed to be entirely without 
 associates, and nobody, in schoolboy language, 
 knew him at home. How he stepped out of the 
 consulting-room of a country doctor straight into 
 the editorial chair of a London evening paper 
 was presumably no mystery to the Globe s owners ; 
 at any rate, they could not have chosen their man 
 better, as the leaps and bounds by which the 
 paper prospered plainly showed. Yet he could 
 not be classed among the " strong " editors. 
 He was a veritable bundle of excitable nerves. 
 I have seen his big frame literally of a tremble, 
 and his sallow complexion grow yet more sallow, 
 before having to face a meeting of the Directors ; 
 and his tempers during the daily production of 
 the paper would have sent the members of his 
 staff crazy had they been half as nervous as he. 
 Being who and what we were, we soon learned 
 to take his impatient and sometimes even in- 
 sulting messages as among the mere ordinary 
 incidents of the morning's work, to be either 
 disregarded or promptly repaid in kind, and then 
 forgotten. Indeed, it was impossible to remember 
 such meteoric flashes in the amiable calm that 
 invariably followed the daily storm. His secret 
 
 154 
 
Writing for the Globe 
 
 of success is, under such temperamental condi- 
 tions, hard to conjecture ; but he must have 
 possessed that secret — among-, I fancy, many 
 others of other kinds. For, after quitting the 
 Globe — I no more know why than why he came 
 there — he returned to his original profession, and 
 acquired a lucrative and fashionable practice, 
 chiefly, I believe, as a specialist in nervous dis- 
 orders. 
 
 The production of an evening paper was a 
 much more leisurely affair then than now, as a 
 subsequent connection with the Globe under later 
 conditions enabled me to realise. At any rate, 
 apart from the self-tormenting temperament of 
 our chief, it was so with us. The small editorial 
 staff^ nominally three or four strong, but actually 
 two or three (one having to be deducted for 
 special and peculiar reasons presently to be 
 shown) assembled at a not peremptorily ten 
 o'clock in a pleasant room in the Strand with a 
 pleasant prospect — the Chapel of the Savoy in 
 the foreground, and, for the distance, the Surrey 
 hills. The leading article was seldom written on 
 the premises, but usually sent in by Pigott, the 
 Licenser of Plays, from outside. There was 
 always plenty of what is called inside matter in 
 type ; so all we had to do among us was to fill 
 up three columns with "Notes of the Day " ; 
 
 155 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 and many of these were Notes of Yesterday, as 
 having been written the previous afternoon. 
 And as to pace, if we had finished by not later 
 than half-past one, we had done very well. Any- 
 body who will take the trouble to work out the 
 question, If three men fill less than three columns 
 of neither small nor close type in three hours 
 and a half, what is the rate of speed per man ? 
 will, I am sure, though I have not myself done 
 the sum, acknowledge that, in speaking of the 
 pace as leisurely, I have not fallen into mis- 
 description. We had, in fact, plenty of time 
 for discussing our " Notes " — and other things 
 as well. 
 
 But I have said that one of our strength on 
 paper had invariably to be deducted in practice. 
 And it was invariably " Tom " Purnell, who had 
 a truly marvellous talent for getting his work 
 done by others. Mr. Comyns Carr, who was 
 also one of us, tells, in his Reminiscences, how 
 Tom would turn up, looking the picture of 
 misery, complaining of a racking headache, and 
 beseeching us to supply his notes, sending them 
 up, of course, as from him ; for no notes, no 
 pay. Nobody had ever the heart to say No ; 
 indeed, he was off and away before he could be 
 refused. But when the morning's work was 
 over, there returned an entirely different Tom ; 
 156 
 
" Tom " Purnell 
 
 jaunty, cheerful, in all the happy consciousness 
 of money earned and duty done. And the trick, 
 however regularly repeated, never failed. It 
 was not, however, such a novelty to me as to 
 Carr, for I had known him and had been occa- 
 sionally among his amused victims for years ; 
 ever since I had met him in Pump Court in 
 company with B. T. Williams, who had known 
 him from when both were boys. His journalistic 
 pay — I dare not call it work — was not confined 
 to the Globe. He was also "Q" of the Athenceum, 
 and considered himself unfairly injured when that 
 pen-name was adopted by another " O." He 
 reviewed books, and sometimes plays, for the 
 Sunday Times : my solitary specimen of dramatic 
 criticism was the result of a visit to the Princess's 
 as his unpaid deputy. He also contributed a 
 weekly London letter to a country paper ; as to 
 one of which there is a characteristic story. 
 Having got two of his press friends to write it 
 for him, they treacherously concocted a wild 
 tissue of outrageously incredible Royal scandal, 
 and forgot, until their joke was past recall, to 
 tremble for the probable result of it to Tom. 
 To their amazed relief, he came to them beaming-, 
 with a highly complimentary letter from the 
 editor of the paper, asking for more in the 
 same style. Strange, however, as it may seem, 
 
 157 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 incredible to any who remember him, I can 
 vouch for his authorship of at any rate one 
 article, for I witnessed its production. He had 
 promised an obituary notice of some one of 
 whom he had special knowledge — I forget who 
 it was — for the Law Magazine. On the evening 
 of the day when it was due he came to me in 
 Pump Court, without the notice, but with a 
 promise for to-morrow. I knew what that meant ; 
 so I insisted on his not leaving the room till the 
 notice was in my hands. He pleaded for five 
 minutes' leave of absence in order to get a 
 preliminary drink ; but I knew what that would 
 mean, too. In short, I was for once in my life 
 inexorable, and maintained a commanding posi- 
 tion between the writing-table and the door 
 while he, after a sigh of resignation, did actually 
 and visibly turn out the promised notice then and 
 there. Few men have anything so remarkable 
 to boast of as getting copy out of Purnell. 
 
 He was Ultimus Bohemorum : the last of the 
 Bohemians. For I do not count among that 
 fraternity those who play at what they like to 
 think Bohemianism by way of a pose, or the 
 hangers-on of literary and artistic clubs for the 
 sake of advertisements or half-crowns. Purnell 
 was a true-born Bohemian, without ambition, 
 foresight, or purpose : he lived for the day, or 
 
 158 
 
" The Last oi the Bohemians " 
 
 rather for the hour. He certainly did most 
 energetically advertise, but never himself — always 
 his friends : and never, though he must have 
 been in very narrow straits at times, did I know 
 or hear of his "borrowing" — so the process is 
 technically termed — so much as a farthing". He 
 used to boast of being " the poorest man in 
 London " : and it is true that his pockets were 
 chronically empty. But then, on the other hand, 
 his wants were singularly few, and those few cost 
 little, some of them nothing, to supply. His 
 tastes and pleasures were inexpensive and so 
 little refined as to argue deficient sensibility. To 
 music he was virtually deaf: to pictures at any 
 rate purblind : and I doubt if he possessed organs 
 of taste or smell save in the most rudimentary 
 form. I suppose it would be an exaggeration 
 to suggest that he could not have told a pint of 
 Guinness from one of Clicquot, or the flavour 
 of the finest Habana from what he termed a 
 " draw " ; but I am sure that he would be .equally 
 content with either. He was not intemperate »* 
 he did not play ; he could not justly be said to 
 dress ; he lodged, I should say very cheaply 
 indeed, over a small shop in the Camden Road ; 
 he belonged to no clubs ; and he could indulge 
 his ruling interest in theatrical life at no cost at 
 all, for there was probably not a theatre of which 
 
 159 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 he had not the freedom both before and behind 
 the scenes. His frail figure with its eager, 
 forward pose, his keen, restless eyes, not less 
 bright and piercing" when the flowing hair and 
 pointed beard had turned to white from brown, 
 were familiar not only there but in painters' 
 studios, newspaper offices, and gatherings of 
 literary coteries. His social range was without 
 bounds, and I think that he not only regarded 
 all his world as a stage, but himself as stage- 
 manager. In that capacity he certainly engineered 
 the historic meeting of Swinburne and Mazzini 
 at Karl Blind's ; and — though here the amount 
 of historic certainty may require discounting — 
 never did his slightest acquaintance become in 
 any way distinguished without his declaring " I'm 
 the poorest man in London, but I made him (or 
 her) : he (or she) would be nowhere if it hadn't 
 been for me." Never was creature so innocent 
 of envy, or so sincerely happy in the success of 
 a friend. In that finest of senses, his friends' 
 successes were truly his own. 
 
 How he came to hold his unique position in 
 literary, artistic, and theatrical London must have 
 been due in some measure to this talent for 
 sympathy. Wholly to this, perhaps : for I can 
 account for it no otherwise. He never spoke of 
 his early life, but I have heard that he had tried 
 i6o 
 
PumelFs Peculiarities 
 
 to keep a school at Tenby, whence he came — a 
 strange sort of a schoolmaster he must have 
 been ! — and he had begun life in London as 
 Secretary to the Trustees of Dr. Williams's 
 Library. Presumably the office required some: 
 degree of punctuality and other attention to 
 business : and any degree, however small, would 
 very speedily become intolerably great to Tom 
 Purnell. At any rate he soon left the Library 
 and became the free lance that I knew so well. 
 
 With the queer inconsistency of many a man 
 who refuses to believe in anything that he does 
 not think he knows, he had a stock of super- 
 stitious observances. He had, or professed, a 
 conviction that there was some occult connection 
 between himself, the hour of midnight, and the 
 colour blue. Consequently a bright blue necktie, 
 on all occasions, was as distinctive a feature of 
 him as his eyes ; and at the height of the most 
 eager or the most thoughtless night-talk he would 
 fall into an anxious silence if, and while, he 
 heard a clock strike twelve. Another fancy of 
 his was to carry his week's wage straight from 
 the Globe office to a neighbouring tavern where 
 he was known, and to change it as evenly as 
 possible into five-shilling pieces, a supply of the 
 coins being kept ready for his expected call. Some 
 early association, however, probably suffices to 
 M i6i 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 explain his visit to a church exactly once a year, 
 namely, on Easter Sunday, and there to join in 
 the Easter hymn. It was the last thing one 
 would expect of him ; but rather than forego that 
 function I believe that he would have let his blue 
 necktie be torn away. 
 
 I have already mentioned Comyns Carr as 
 among our editorial staff! My recollections of 
 him are uniformly pleasant ; but as he is, happily, 
 a fellow-survivor of those Mid- Victorian days, 
 and has published his own reminiscences of them, 
 I must salute him with a very cordial bow and 
 pass on. Would that I could thus salute among 
 our fellow-survivors another colleague whose 
 pathetic death some five years ago moved many 
 hearts when it happened, and many more when 
 the whole of his life-story was told — Professor 
 John Churton Collins. Of course he was no 
 professor then, but a young enthusiast fresh from 
 Balliol, so saturated with the poetry of Greece 
 and Britain that it overflowed. With little en- 
 couragement, or indeed with none, he would 
 burst into a declamation of some speech or chorus 
 from Sophocles, evidently and touchingly taking 
 for granted that we revelled in its sound and 
 sense as fully as he. He had a prodigious 
 memory ; but, like most people so gifted, was apt 
 to trust it too implicitly, as one incident plainly 
 162 
 
John Chiirton Collins 
 
 showed. He had written what we called a 
 "Turnover" (an article over-running the last 
 column of the front page, so that, in order to 
 finish it, a reader must turn to the next), showing 
 how frequently common quotations are mis-quo- 
 tations. That was easy enough, for one of his 
 wide reading and ready memory. Unluckily, 
 however, the greater number of his corrections 
 were as incorrect as the mis-quotations that 
 they were meant to be-pillory. Painful were the 
 ensuing letters from correspondents each of whom 
 was pleased, in one instance of mishap or another, 
 to be able to correct the correction, and to catch 
 the Globe tripping. I certainly never afterwards 
 heard Collins charged with inaccurate scholarship: 
 so he may have learned, by this experience, that 
 verification of references is not more important 
 than of quotations. 
 
 163 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 The "Decemviri" — Algernon Charles Swinburne — James 
 MacNeill Whistler— Joseph Knight— The Marston circle 
 — Dante Gabriel Rossetti— William Morris — Dr. Richard 
 Garnett — Astrology— Philip Bourke Marston— Oliver 
 Madox Brown — Louise Chandler Moulton — " Fiona Mac- 
 leod" — Arthur O'Shaughnessy — "Nelly" — Mrs. Lynn 
 Linton 
 
 Among the incidents of Tom Purnell's general 
 stage-managership was the formation of a small 
 society in which no two members should repre- 
 sent the same Art or Profession. We called our- 
 selves the " Decemviri," as limiting our number to 
 ten ; in fact, we were never more than nine, a 
 vacancy being purposely left in case of some 
 future overwhelming claim to be of our company. 
 Our only rule was to dine together not less often 
 than once a month either at some restaurant or at 
 the house of some member who could conveniently 
 entertain, with unlimited licence for irregular 
 meetings. We had neither president, nor secretary, 
 nor treasurer; indeed the latter would have been 
 an especially superfluous office, because we had no 
 subscriptions. The place and date of each meet- 
 164 
 
The " Decemviri " 
 
 ing were settled at the close of the preceding, 
 and information thereof forwarded to an absentee 
 by any one who would volunteer for that excep- 
 tional duty. Poetry was represented by Swin- 
 burne ; painting by Whistler ; criticism by Joseph 
 Knight ; the stage by Dominick Murray ; archi- 
 tecture by Jekyll, in rising repute for ornamental 
 design — " Jekyll of the Gates " was his regular 
 designation on account of a work that had won 
 special attention ; journalism by Purnell ; fiction 
 by myself ; law by B. T. Williams ; medicine by 
 Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson, who had not 
 yet entered upon his anti-alcohol crusade. . . . 
 Of all the nine I alone am left alive. 
 
 Among our systematic informalities was that 
 we kept no minutes or any record of our meet- 
 ings. This, though it made for ease and freedom, 
 I now regret, since an account of a club of such 
 a sort, counting Swinburne and Whistler among 
 fewer members than one's fingers, would be 
 interesting in fuller detail than I, its only 
 potential historian as the last of the Decemvirs, 
 can, in my notelessness, now supply. There 
 was good talk among us — how could there 
 fail to be where those two met, and with Joseph 
 Knight there also, whose talk was yet better than 
 theirs ? I am, alas, no Boswell, or it might be 
 that the fame of our club might run that of Tlie 
 
 165 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Club hard. How far my recollections have been 
 turned by time into a rosy twilight, of course I 
 cannot know. Yet, even though the rose-light 
 be extreme, I am not sure that we could not 
 quite well have held our own against our historic 
 rival. The eloquence of Burke and the humour 
 of Goldsmith are by no means conspicuous in 
 such table-talk of theirs as has been handed down, 
 and we were free from any Johnsonian oppres- 
 sion. Then, too, we were by our very constitu- 
 tion exempt from the besetting vice of purely 
 literary coteries, as I heard it illustrated, at a 
 gathering of one of them, by the novelist David 
 Christie Murray. " I keep my good things for 
 my books," said he, in his weightiest way. 
 "Then, my dear Murray," instantly retorted 
 Byron Webber, " why on earth don't you put 
 'em there ? " 
 
 The first meeting of the Decemviri was held 
 at a French restaurant — I forget its name, and if 
 it still exists should be unable to identify it — in 
 Old Compton Street, Soho. In the same quarter 
 we continued to meet, unless at Whistler's in 
 Chelsea, or at Knight's in Camden Square, or, 
 more frequently, for Sunday supper at the 
 Dominick Murrays' lodgings in the Hampstead 
 Road."]^,. I have; put the last surname in the plural 
 because, though we were an essentially male 
 i66 
 
Meeting-places of the Society 
 
 society, Mrs. Murray always presided at her own 
 table, and nothing would have been farther from 
 our pleasure than the withdrawal of so good a 
 comrade when her duty as hostess was done. 
 She was Miss Josephine Fiddes on the stage. 
 I have none but the kindliest memory of her, 
 save for one incident beyond the pale of pardon. 
 She was a warm-coloured brunette, with hair as 
 black as hair can be ; and one Sunday evening, 
 on entering the room, I was appalled to find it, 
 not suddenly grown white, but transmuted to 
 brilliant gold. The fashion of golden locks for 
 actresses, and their imitators, was just setting in ; 
 and had carried her away. 
 
 The Decemviri never dissolved. I am the 
 Decemviri. Nor is it possible to fix a date at 
 which they ceased to meet. No meeting can be 
 called the last, because none was so considered. 
 But there were two points in our constitution that 
 made for certain though, in our case, long-post* 
 poned decay. One was the limitation of our 
 number. Our very title, '* the Ten," prevented 
 us from receiving new members unless to supply 
 vacancies ; and there might not be a single 
 vacancy for half a century to come. The other 
 was the very reason for our existence — that we 
 should be of different vocations, so far as some 
 unavoidable overlapping allowed. This, though 
 
 167 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 it brought us the better together at first, inevit- 
 ably tended to separation as our lines of life more 
 and more diverged. Opportunities, and then 
 possibilities, of coming all together at a given 
 place and given time gradually grew rarer and 
 rarer, until we ceased to be comrades, while in 
 no case ceasing to be friends. And then, when 
 vacancies did occur, should we have had the heart 
 to fill them ? I think not. After all, when I 
 wrote " I am the Decemviri," I wrote wrong. 
 Counting ghosts, there are eight more. And 
 anything more intensely, more immortally alive 
 than a Ghost no memory of mine can conceive. 
 
 I saw but little of Swinburne in after years ; 
 and from what I have read about him in the 
 way of descriptive portraiture, either his personal 
 appearance must have considerably improved 
 with age — as indeed very frequently happens ; 
 or else the portrayers must have idealised pretty 
 freely, seeing the poet's reflection in his outward 
 form. At that time there was something femininely 
 feline in his features, narrowing downwards from 
 a good breadth of brow to a feebly receding chin ; 
 the eyes said nothing, and the thin lips smirked 
 rather than smiled. His voice and manner were 
 gentle, even deferential ; yet one could not but 
 be aware that their softness concealed a claw 
 even before having read a page of his vitupera- 
 i68 
 
Swinburne and Whistler 
 
 live prose, in which the savage scratch always 
 seemed emphasised by a furious scream. We, 
 at any rate, knew only his amiable side ; and, 
 despite the claw under the glove, I do not believe 
 that he really had any other. When one can 
 versify like him — and if there have been greater 
 poets, he is unapproached as a versifier — one 
 must needs versify ; and if one can scold like 
 him, I suppose one must needs scold. Good 
 sense is not essential to good verse, nor malice to 
 angry words : and what fuller amiability of nature 
 can be evident than in hero-worship and baby- 
 worship combined ? Strength and helplessness 
 alike made to him irresistible appeal. 
 
 An unfailing stimulant to lively talk and good 
 spirits was the gay nonchalance of Whistler, never 
 so coolly gay as when the hot water in which he 
 delighted to find himself was beginning to boil. 
 In conversation he was piquant and amusing 
 rather than witty, but he was invariably those, 
 and he had a quaint language of his own, neither 
 English, nor French, nor American, but com- 
 posed of all three in the matter of accent, and, 
 in that of syntax, of none. He rejoiced so much 
 in anything like a battle that I think he would 
 have liked to be on both sides at once, had that 
 been possible. I remember his saying once, 
 when talk turned on the American Civil War, 
 
 169 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 that he was for the North out of his veneration 
 for the Flag— as if he venerated anything in the 
 universe ! — and for the South because its cause 
 represented the " Divine right of Rebellion." 
 No doubt he was thoroughly in earnest about his 
 Art, but he as certainly posed, even about that, 
 in the role of moqueur. I object to French 
 words when one is trying to write in English : 
 but they cannot be avoided when Whistler is the 
 theme. We did not touch upon politics much or 
 often : upon the party politics of the day I think 
 never. They did not seem to us either interest- 
 ing or important. From Swinburne's point of 
 view, as an ardent prophet of Mazzini and Victor 
 Hugo, they were necessarily trivial. Whistler's 
 party of course consisted of Whistler. Knight's 
 was the French stage. Purnell had transposed 
 the old toast and sentiment, " Measures, not 
 men," into " Men, not measures," and, adopting 
 the latter reading as his maxim, called himself 
 Tory because he preferred Disraeli's personality 
 to Gladstone's, Williams inconsistently combined 
 rather antiquated Radicalism with a disciple's 
 admiration of Carlyle. The politics of the other 
 four, myself included, I do not remember, if I 
 ever knew. 
 
 Of Joseph Knight I continued to see a good 
 deal after the dormancy of the Decemviri : what 
 170 
 
Joseph Knight 
 
 delightful company was his the many who still 
 share the latter memory of it need not be 
 reminded, while those who never knew it cannot 
 be told. He radiated geniality, whether with a 
 single companion or, as he loved to be, and as 
 all men, and all women also, loved him to be, 
 the centre of a crowded room. I was never a 
 playgoer, but my occasional visits to theatres 
 under his guidance are among the pleasantest of 
 my recollections. It was with him that I saw 
 Aim^e Desclee, of too brief career, who showed 
 me what acting can be, and thereby raised my 
 dramatic standard too fastidiously high for ordinary 
 enjoyment. If her consummate art were the 
 rule, I must have become a playgoer, instead of 
 feeling more or less dissatisfied with the best that 
 cannot be hers. Such visits would be followed 
 by another to the Arundel Club, whose evenings 
 scarcely began till the theatres had closed, and 
 never ended till the hours could no longer be 
 called small. Knight was nowhere more in his 
 social element than there. He was the most 
 essentially clubbable of men. 
 
 From the little circle of the Decemviri lay but 
 a single step into the large one centred by 
 Dr. Westland Marston. His Sunday evenings, 
 or rather Sunday nights, in Northumberland 
 Terrace, Regent's Park, were for long the regular 
 
 171 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 rendezvous of a set too numerous to be called 
 a coterie. Knight was rarely if ever absent ; 
 Purnell was a frequent and Swinburne an occa- 
 sional visitor ; so my own introduction was in the 
 natural order of things, and thenceforth my find- 
 ing my way there whenever I had nothing, and 
 often when I had something, else to do. I was 
 much fascinated by the glamour of Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti's poems, and here I now and again met 
 their poet, who looked his poetry, as Swinburne 
 did not, and as William Morris certainly did not, 
 whose comical figure with the mop-head was also 
 met there now and again. I cannot say that 
 Rossetti's presence was enlivening. My most 
 representative recollection of him is of his sitting 
 beside Mrs. Morris, who looked as if she had 
 stepped out of any one of his pictures, both 
 wrapped in a motionless silence as of a world 
 where souls have no need of words. And silence, 
 however poetically golden, was a sin in a poet 
 whose voice in speech was so musical as his — hers 
 I am sure I never heard. Morris was bluff and 
 jovial ; and had I been informed that the reputed 
 poet of " The Earthly Paradise," Socialist agitator, 
 artistic printer, and designer of wallpapers was 
 in reality a merchant-skipper, I should not have 
 been a whit surprised. The reader will be kind 
 enough to understand that I am but recalling 
 172 
 
The Marston Circle 
 
 superficial impressions, and that the extent of 
 my acquaintance with either was not sufficient for 
 adding anything to what others have written out 
 of fuller knowledge. 
 
 I suppose that nobody ever used the reading- 
 room of the British Museum for research or 
 study during his superintendence of it without 
 incurring a debt of gratitude to Dr. Richard 
 Garnett for material and valuable aid. There 
 really seemed no department of human know- 
 ledge in which he was not a qualified guide, 
 and his service as such was as ready and willing 
 as the consequent calls upon it were unsparing. He 
 had married a near relation of Marston, and, living 
 no farther from Northumberland Terrace than 
 Primrose Hill, seldom missed a Sunday evening. 
 My own special interest in him was due to my 
 having taken to dabble in Astrology, in which 
 he was an adept and a thoroughly convinced 
 believer. I had entered upon the study of that 
 venerably ancient art for amusement and out of 
 curiosity, and though I had fallen, as a matter 
 of course, under its fascination, I never attained 
 to the state of a true believer. None the less, 
 some experiences among the horoscopes of my 
 friends presently began to act as warnings that 
 I might possibly be playing with edged tools ; 
 at any rate that the play might prove to be 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 considerably more than merely play. Among 
 my consultants was Mrs. Louise Chandler 
 Moulton, the American poetess, who asked me 
 to cast and judge the horoscope of another poet, 
 Marston's blind son Philip, in whom she was 
 deeply and warmly interested. I consented to 
 make the experiment, on condition that he 
 should know nothing of the matter. She ob- 
 tained for me the necessary data, and I found, 
 clearly enough, that he, then a strong young 
 man, sound in health, and with apparently as 
 good a life as could be wished for, would die in 
 a certain month (February, I think) within two 
 years. No prediction could seem less likely to 
 come to pass, and none could be more precisely 
 fulfilled. In the predicted month of the predicted 
 year Philip Bourke Marston died. Nor could 
 it be a possible case of the effect of such a 
 prediction upon a timid nature. Philip, had he 
 known of it, would have treated it with robustly 
 scornful ridicule ; and, in fact, he did not know 
 of it. Mrs. Moulton kept the horoscope and 
 the secret too. Another consultant was a lady, 
 well connected and of good position, with every 
 apparent prospect of a happy and prosperous 
 life, and no suggestion, either in her circumstances 
 or character, of any imaginable peril. Her I had 
 to tell, in as veiled a way as might be, that unless 
 174 
 
Dabbling in Astrology 
 
 she soon escaped from a certain evil personal 
 influence, unknowable by me, she was destined to 
 total and irretrievable ruin. Once more, nothing 
 seemed less likely : nothing ever came more true. 
 She had to escape from England in order to 
 escape from English law. 
 
 These and some slighter successes led Garnett 
 to regard me as an adept, or in the way of be- 
 coming one, and he gave me some papers on 
 the science of the subject, contributed by him to 
 its literature under a pen-name, that assisted my 
 growing determination to leave the Stars alone. 
 If the theory of Astrology was baseless, to attempt 
 its reduction to practice was as much waste of 
 time and labour as trying to square the circle. 
 If, on the contrary, its fundamental principles, as 
 Garnett went far to convince me, were sound, 
 nothing can ever be more dangerous than the 
 erroneous application of true principles to prac- 
 tical affairs ; and more or less erroneous any such 
 application of astrological principles cannot, in the 
 vast majority of cases, fail to be. I certainly 
 failed to die at my own destined date, namely, 
 within the six months either preceding or follow 
 ing my forty-second birthday, and my amount of 
 faith fell very far short of Burton's, of " The 
 Anatomy of Melancholy," who is reputed to have 
 taken his own life rather than falsify the voice of 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 the stars. On the other hand, from the fact that 
 those twelve months were the only period of 
 continuous ill-health that I have hitherto known, 
 they may be regarded as at any rate a partial 
 justification of my prediction, prevented from 
 being complete by the oversight of some obscure 
 but material aspect or some error in calculation : 
 upon such well-nigh unavoidable mischances does 
 the most careful judgement of the most accurately 
 constructed horoscope depend. But then again 
 it may be rejoined that forty-two (the " lesser 
 climacteric " as it used to be called) is a notoriously 
 hazardous age with regard to life and health ; a 
 common crisis requiring no special mention. 
 This, however, being a volume of reminis- 
 cences, not of opinions, I will return to its 
 proper topics, only palliating my temporary 
 fall under the fascination of the Zodiac and 
 the Planets by pleading more considerable ex- 
 amples than mine. I began with Garnett : a no 
 less convinced student of Astrology was the late 
 Fitzgerald Molloy, the voluminous and popular 
 author in the field of biographical history, also 
 a frequenter of the evenings in Northumber- 
 land Terrace, who consistently regulated his life 
 in all its details, great and small, by its instruc- 
 tions. When I last saw him, about four years 
 ago, he told me that he was warned against 
 176 
 
Disbelief in the Occult 
 
 bringing out his regular annual volume during 
 that year. And it happened to be the year in 
 which he died. After all, allowing the Science 
 all that its disciples claim, with a large discount 
 for unavoidable oversights and errors in practice, 
 it was not very satisfactory (from one point of 
 view) for me to be told that I was going to die 
 when I was only going to be unwell, and for 
 Molloy to be merely advised to postpone publi- 
 cation when the warning meant that he was to 
 die. 
 
 After what I have been saying on this 
 subject, I may possibly be suspected of having 
 been, if only for a moment, victimised by the 
 epidemic of interest in occult matters that swept 
 over the mid-years of the Victorian reign, and 
 expressed itself in all sorts of fantastic fashions — - 
 mesmerism, table-turning, spiritism, planchette, 
 crystal-gazing, telepathy, clairvoyance, and such 
 like, as to which I neither have reminiscences nor 
 think it worth while to have opinions, beyond a 
 very strong one of the need of strict observance 
 of the rules of evidence and of the constantly 
 reckless disregard of them. There is nothing 
 occult or mystical about Astrology. That is as 
 purely an affair of rule and reckoning as Astro- 
 nomy — the irreproachable daughter of a dis- 
 reputable though still fascinating mother. Of 
 N 177 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 course I have assisted at the dancing of furniture 
 and at the vagaries of planchette. It was im- 
 possible, at one time, to go into company of any 
 sort without being bored by one or the other. 
 And I remember, at Cambridge, a big and 
 solemn Pole, Zamoiski by name, who once held 
 a sort of informal mesmeric stance in somebody's 
 rooms. The results of his experiments were not 
 memorably impressive ; and when he held me 
 with his glittering eye, and made his magnetic 
 passes, I, though unresisting, was no more 
 affected than the chair on which I was sitting. 
 For the rest, I have never taken part in any 
 spiritistic exhibition, or seen a ghost, or anybody 
 who convinced me that he or she had actually 
 seen one ; or interviewed a clairvoyant ; or stared 
 into a splash of ink or crystal ball. As to all 
 such things I am a Gallio : or rather, perhaps, 
 too much of a mystic by nature to give ready 
 belief to the possibility of spiritual experiences 
 obtained through the bodily senses and in material 
 form. 
 
 To return, however, to Northumberland 
 Terrace on Sunday night. Another poet was 
 of the household, whose death I have mentioned, 
 even as it happened, before its time — Philip 
 Bourke Marston, the blind poet of "Wind 
 178 
 
Philip Bourke Marston 
 
 Voices," " All in All," and " Songtide," and his 
 father's only son. He had not been born blind, 
 but had lost his sight through an injury to his 
 eyes while still a child, and was in other respects 
 a man of many sorrows, fated, though no more 
 than thirty-seven at the time of his own death, 
 to be the survivor of all his dearest friends save 
 one, and then to cause the like sorrow by leaving 
 to yet more solitary survivorship the father who, 
 but for him, had already by then been left alone. 
 At the immediate time that I am recalling Philip 
 had suffered a blow from which I think he never 
 wholly recovered by the death of May Nesbit, 
 to whom he was engaged to be married : and 
 this in the freshness of the success of his earliest 
 work, " Songtide." But he still as yet had his 
 loving and beloved mother, and his devoted sister 
 Cicely who lived only for him, and the friend of 
 his heart, Oliver Madox Brown, the precocious 
 genius who was a mature poet at fourteen, wrote 
 the story of " The Black Swan " — published, and 
 considerably spoiled by recasting, under the title 
 of " Gabriel Denver " — at sixteen, and would 
 have finished "The Dwale Bluth " (the deadly 
 nightshade) had he not died at nineteen. I 
 wonder if those two powerful novels, strangely 
 powerful from so young a pen, have readers now. 
 They had plenty then. Oliver was half-a-dozen 
 
 179 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 years younger than Philip — a long separation 
 when it lies between sixteen and two-and-twenty, 
 but negligible in their case, for in all respects that 
 matter the boy was older than the young man. 
 Indeed I doubt if Oliver had ever been a boy: 
 nobody thought of regarding him as such : while 
 I am sure that Philip would never have wholly 
 ceased to be one had he lived to twice his age. 
 The two mingled but little with the rest of the 
 company, but mostly sat together in Philip's 
 special den, comparing the criticisms and enthu- 
 siasms that filled their minds. The death of 
 Oliver was Philip's second great sorrow ; and 
 even as his first had come with the success of his 
 first book, so came this with the completion of 
 his second. 
 
 I must anticipate the third and the fourth that 
 were, with others of lesser magnitude, crowded 
 into his few years. The third was the loss of 
 his mother. But the deepest and bitterest was 
 the sudden death of his sister Cicely, who, as I 
 have said, lived for him alone, with whose hand 
 he wrote, and through whose eyes he saw. That 
 the characteristic note and persistent burden of 
 his poetry is the inseparable union of love and 
 death, can scarcely, under so much experience of 
 the apparent truth of note and burden, be set 
 down as merely morbid. But I have also referred 
 i8o 
 
Louise Chandler Moulton 
 
 to one friendship of his that was to endure to the 
 end. It was that of Louise Chandler Moulton, 
 the American poetess of " Swallow Flights," 
 already mentioned in connection with my 
 astrological adventures. I shall probably mention 
 her some few times more, as she became a very 
 dear friend of my own. Indeed she holds so 
 large and intimate a place among my memories 
 that she should naturally occupy a corresponding 
 space in their chronicle. So I will at any rate 
 abridge that space by refraining from literary 
 criticism of the graceful verse that has gone to 
 so many hearts and homes in our country as well 
 as in hers, and has stayed where it has gone. 
 Apart from what she gave to the world, her 
 personality was full of interest and charm. Never 
 had poetry so passionate a lover. It was her 
 life — I might almost say her religion, such con- 
 solation she found in it throughout a life that 
 was far from happy. I used to think her rather 
 indiscriminate in her admirations, and too readily 
 subservient to reputations, especially if they were 
 accepted by her circle. But she rarely failed to 
 justify her liking by reading or reciting a poem 
 or passage in dispute with such a sympathy as 
 to bring out unsuspected beauties. I especially 
 remember a walk one evening along Thames 
 Bank (as I wish the stupidly styled Victoria 
 
 i8i 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Embankment had been named) when some 
 depreciatory remark of mine set her off into a 
 poetical declamation that lasted from Charing 
 Cross to the Temple, and part of the way back 
 again : one recitation leading to another until the 
 original question was forgotten. She did not 
 talk much, or brilliantly, and made no eftort to 
 shine : she attracted chiefly, I think, by a sweet- 
 ness of manner, and by a sympathy with persons, 
 as well as with poems, that was unmistakably 
 and indeed demonstrably sincere. Attract she 
 did, beyond all question : women and men alike 
 felt the influence of her quiet charm. When I 
 first met her at Marston's she was beginning a 
 residence of some years in London after a period 
 of continental travel durino- which she had made 
 the acquaintance of Mallarme and others of the 
 then youngest school of French poets, whom she 
 also included in the circle of her admiration — a 
 circle without circumference, as it seemed to me. 
 But the work of others, however intense her 
 appreciation of it, had no perceptible effect upon 
 her own. This, if too delicately sentimental for 
 strength, was never without distinction : her own 
 personality, and none but hers, was evident in 
 every line. Indeed her work is so much herself 
 that to know it is much the same as to know her. 
 The melancholy ; the sense of loneliness ; the 
 182 
 
Louise Chandler Moulton 
 
 desire, without the power, to fix a belief; the 
 dread of the grave as the unresting-place of a 
 conscious soul, were only too real : I doubt if 
 she ever wrote, or could have written a verse 
 that was not the expression of an actual mood. 
 No doubt in this absolute sincerity of her poems 
 lay a good half of the secret of the success of 
 their appeal to the multitude of likewise lonesome,^ 
 timid, and unsettled souls. 
 
 Yet "lonely" must seem a word of strangely 
 inappropriate application to a woman so sur- 
 rounded with warmly affectionate friendships as 
 was she. Her return to Boston did not appreci' 
 ably interrupt them, for she never let a year pass, 
 not even that which was but too apparently to be 
 her last, without a visit to England for at least 
 six months of the twelve, and for five of the six 
 to London. During these she certainly was not 
 left alone, and her own receptions on Friday 
 afternoons were the very opposite of solitude. 
 There was literally no notable author or artist, 
 British or American, whom one would be sur- 
 prised to meet at them. I seldom attended them 
 myself, because of my inveterate dislike to a 
 crowd of any sort ; but I continued to see her 
 frequently, and to combat, as best I could, the sad 
 self-consciousness which, without seeming cause, 
 weighed upon her more and more from year to 
 
 183 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 year. But ever more and more in vain : for the 
 cause was her own temperament, against which 
 it was necessarily fruitless to contend. I wish 
 she could have been but half as happy as she was 
 amiable and kind. She would then have been 
 a happy woman indeed. I have not seen the 
 memoir that has been written of her, but am sure 
 that the best informed biographer cannot have 
 known a tithe of her charities, too generously to 
 be always wisely bestowed ; and her judgments 
 were as generous as her alms. She was indeed 
 charitable in the broadest sense, even beyond 
 reasonable bounds. She seemed to think that 
 nobody but herself could do wrong. 
 
 Among others whom she knew the most 
 intimately, and of whom I consequently saw a 
 good deal at one time, was "Willy" Sharp, best 
 known to fame as Fiona Macleod. And here 
 I must make, in my character of critic, a humili- 
 ating confession. When it was whispered about, 
 long before it was known, that Fiona was Willy, 
 I was of those who altogether scouted the notion 
 as utterly absurd. I knew him well enough to 
 see the unlikelihood of the identity of an industri- 
 ous and capable man of letters, working along all 
 the ordinary lines of verse and prose — so industri- 
 ously prolific indeed as to have, one would think, 
 no time for another existence — with the supremely 
 184 
 
" Fiona Macleod " 
 
 feminine incarnation (inumbration it turned out) 
 of the Celtic Muse. I ought to have known him 
 a great deal worse — or else impossibly better. 
 On the other hand, I cannot share in the solemnly 
 nonsensical theory that Sharp's body was actually 
 and without metaphor the abode of two separate, 
 independent, and violently contrasted, if not 
 mutually antagonistic, souls. There was about 
 him a considerable dash of the gamin ; and, as 
 gamin, he would enjoy the mystification — not to 
 call it hoax — in the spirit of mischievous fun. 
 That it required genius to carry the mystification 
 out, is true ; but then he had humour besides. 
 I know he had the gift of being at once able to 
 laugh in his sleeve, and hold his tongue. I think 
 I have already met in print with the trick he 
 played upon an enthusiastic admirer of Fiona 
 who wrote her (care of her publishers, her private 
 address being secret) a request for her photo- 
 graph : how Sharp gratified him with the portrait 
 of an exceedingly pretty girl. I have given the 
 anecdote in case I should be mistaken as to its 
 having been told before, and, in that case, for 
 the benefit of those who, knowing Sharp only 
 through his work, are disposed to take him too 
 solemnly. He was not only Willy Sharp plus 
 Fiona Macleod, but also imaginative enthusiast 
 plus practical humorist. The former combination 
 
 185 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 was unique : the latter is less rare than many 
 people are able to suppose. 
 
 I cannot remember whether Sharp frequented 
 Marston's Sunday nights. But another young 
 poet — shall I never come to an end of these 
 poets .-^ Surely Primrose Hill must have been 
 a misnomer for Mount Parnassus! — Arthur 
 O'Shaughnessy, already the author of the •' Epic 
 of Women," did frequent them to very good 
 purpose indeed, for he thus wooed and won his 
 friend Philip's elder sister Eleanor. There were 
 but few of the characteristic Marston traits in 
 " Nelly." The true home of the family was a 
 poetical cloudland : hers was just Number some- 
 thing (I forget which), Northumberland Terrace, 
 Regent's Park, N.W. Her bright spirits and 
 keen sense of the ridiculous secured for her a 
 small court of her own, of which the language was 
 plain prose. She was amusing, too, in other 
 ways than talk. I have known her, for instance, 
 suddenly discover, in the middle of a morning 
 call, that she must have dropped her hat or 
 bonnet somewhere on the way, since it was no 
 longer on her hair — not in the least to her dis- 
 comfort, but much to her own amusement ; for 
 she was one of the few who are perpetual jokes 
 to themselves. Her sense of the absurd in her- 
 self as well as in others was certainly not accom- 
 i86 
 
Arthur O'Shaiighiiessy 
 
 panied by any sense of order : it must have been 
 the extreme force of contrast that attracted 
 O'Shaughnessy, who was habitually grave, quietly 
 pensive, and invariably what lady-novelists term 
 well-groomed. His duties in the British Museum 
 related to snakes and lizards. That, however, 
 was by no means an unpoetical interest ; more 
 obviously poetical, at any rate, than Oliver 
 Madox Brown's uncanny affection for toads, one 
 of which would certainly have been called his 
 " familiar " in days when superstitions were less 
 leniently dealt with than in these. The wedding 
 of Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Nelly Marston 
 was the only occasion on which I met Robert 
 Browning, who proposed one of the toasts cus- 
 tomary at such celebrations in very much the 
 customary terms. Of him I can only say that 
 I wish I could say more. 
 
 Then there was Mrs. Lynn Linton, whom I 
 came to know well : stern-eyed and spectacled as 
 a typical school-ma'am, and not averse, on what 
 she thought fit occasion, from practising the part 
 she looked so well. Her demand for logical 
 accuracy and accurate logic was severe. " My 
 dear," I once heard her rebuke a young woman 
 whom she then met for the first time, and who 
 had been handling some topic with youthful 
 certitude — " my dear, before you venture to 
 
 187 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 express any opinion, always make your meaning 
 clear to yourself by writing." If this course were 
 to be generally adopted, it is to be feared that 
 expressions of opinion, young or old, would 
 become so rare as to bring all ordinary talk to a 
 standstill ; but to that objection she would doubt- 
 lessly have replied, So much the better. But, as 
 I have had opportunities of knowing, anybody, 
 but especially any woman, in doubt of mind or 
 trouble of heart, who made the ascent to the 
 abode nearest the sky in all London — the top- 
 most storey (the tenth, I think it is) of Queen 
 Anne's Mansions — never failed to find there the 
 tenderest while the wisest and sincerest of 
 counsel. She would have made an ideal Con- 
 fessor, could only her sex have been changed and 
 her wild theology tamed. 
 
 I must not quite omit Mrs. Craik — that is to 
 say Dinah Mulock, whose " John Halifax, 
 Gentleman," had been read by everybody when 
 I was a boy. She was Philip's godmother : a 
 very quiet, elderly lady, whom, though I do not 
 forget, I do not distinctly remember. And, 
 indeed, at times my remembrance of all that 
 typically and essentially mid-Victorian circle is 
 very like that of a long-past dream. For of the 
 whole of the gifted family that drew it together 
 not one remains. Father, mother, only son, both 
 i88 
 
End of the Marston Circle 
 
 daughters, and son-in-law — all have long been 
 dead, with none to come after them. I suppose 
 I must have some fellow-survivors from those 
 Sunday nights. But not one of those whom I have 
 mentioned is among them, and scarcely any other 
 whose name, face, or voice I can recall. 
 
 189 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 Marriage — John Barnett, the " Father of English Opera" 
 — The Abbe Liszt — At Milan in the 'sixties — Arthur 
 Seymour Sullivan — Frederick Cowen — Mme. Trebelli- 
 Bettini — George Grossmith — Charles Kensington Sala- 
 man — Walter Bache 
 
 I MARRIED in 1872. Rosamond, my wife, was 
 the elder of the two daughters of John Barnett, 
 the composer of "The Mountain Sylph," the 
 Grand Opera with an English libretto which ran 
 the then unprecedented number of a hundred con- 
 secutive nights on its production in the 'thirties, 
 and has taken rank as a musical classic. But 
 though it is with this work that his name is pri- 
 marily identified, "The Father of English Opera," 
 as he came to be called, was also the composer of 
 " Farinelli," " Fair Rosamond," and " Kathleen " 
 for the lyric stage, and is credited with a thou- 
 sand songs — a number probably well below the 
 mark. I wish he had written his reminiscences : 
 for he had been closely acquainted with most of 
 the musical celebrities of the earlier period of his 
 long life of fourscore and eighteen years (1802 
 to 1900) : and not with the celebrities of his own 
 190 
 
The Abbe Liszt 
 
 Art only, for he. had lived, in Paris, on intimate 
 terms with Thackeray when both were young— 
 of about the age at which he is represented by 
 a French painter in the National Portrait Gallery. 
 My wife, through him, was a second cousin of 
 Meyerbeer and a first of John Francis Barnett, 
 the still living composer of " The Ancient 
 Mariner " ; through her mother she was a grand- 
 daughter of the celebrated and, according to all 
 accounts, unsurpassable violoncellist, Robert 
 Lindley ; and she was a god-daughter of the 
 Abbe Liszt. I have his christening gift, an 
 embossed silver cup, among my relics : and — to 
 pass over, for the occasion, nearly all the remain- 
 ing matter of this volume, I have also seen and 
 heard him play. It was at the reception in his 
 honour during his visit to London, in 1886 (I 
 think), very shortly before his death. A picturesque 
 figure he was in his old age, with the cascade of 
 iron-grey hair falling below the shoulders, and 
 the masterful features which, rugged, like Crom- 
 well's, with warts and lines, gave, with the help 
 of his ecclesiastical garb, much more the idea of 
 some great mediaeval prelate than of a prodigy of 
 —the only descriptive word that satisfies my 
 memory is Legerdemain. I have specially 
 spoken of having seen as well as heard him ; for 
 without watching his fingers one would have 
 
 191 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 missed the essence of the performance : the skill 
 with which he overcame apparent impossibilities, 
 and seemed to overcome real ones. To me, at 
 any rate, the interest of the performance consisted 
 wholly in the personality of the player. But then 
 I never heard him but that once ; what pieces he 
 played were then previously unknown and are now 
 forgotten, beyond an impression that they were 
 compositions of his own, no doubt selected as 
 tours de foi'ce ; and of course I was told — and 
 probably with justice — that I ought to have heard 
 him when he was young. For the praisers of the 
 past have been with us always : and they are not 
 always in the wrong. 
 
 To return from 1886 to 1872. My wife and 
 her younger sister Clara — still, as Mrs. Henry 
 Rogers, exercising an eminent authority in the 
 musical world of Boston as teacher and writer — 
 continued the traditions and associations into 
 which they had been born by becoming themselves 
 highly accomplished musicians. From their birth 
 they were destined, and accordingly educated, 
 for the concert room and the operatic stage, first 
 by their father ; then at the Conservatorium of 
 Leipzig when Moscheles was its director ; then 
 at Milan under Sangiovanni. Were these my 
 wife's reminiscences as well as my own, there 
 would be much to tell of the Italy of the time 
 192 
 
At Milan in the 'Sixties 
 
 preceding the so-called Unity. The social and 
 artistic circles in which the sisters found them- 
 selves were of the revolutionary sentiment that 
 seems, by some law of political nature, to prevail 
 among poets, painters, and musicians. It is not 
 to underrate the strength of the popular senti- 
 ment to perceive its childish side. Certainly the 
 revolution was not brought a whit nearer by a 
 shower from the roof of a theatre among the 
 audience of slips of paper inscribed with Roma o 
 Morte : or by shouts of Viva Verdi — not out of 
 enthusiasm for the composer, as he was dis- 
 appointed to find, but because the letters of his 
 name initialled V-ittorio E-manuele R-e D' 
 I-talia. Somebody at home sent out to the sisters 
 a present of a blouse apiece, of which, by some 
 perverse ill-luck, the pattern was in yellow and 
 black : the Austrian colours. It was in the first 
 days of their stay in Milan, and they were as yet 
 ignorant that to wear yellow and black in the 
 streets of an Italian city was as prudent as flourish- 
 ing a red handkerchief in the face of a bull. 
 Their ignorance did not last long. The first 
 time they went out of doors they were first 
 puzzled, then bewildered, then alarmed, by the 
 way in which they were followed, in one of the 
 public gardens, by a gathering crowd, which 
 presently left them in no manner of doubt that 
 O 193 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 they were themselves the objects of its attention; 
 Matters would have gone very ill indeed had not 
 an Italian acquaintance, a well-known partisan of 
 the popular cause, perceived their plight and 
 come to their rescue. " Were you mad ? " he 
 asked, when, at some peril to himself, he had 
 brought them into shelter and helped them to 
 hide the obnoxious colours. " Of course they 
 took you for Austrian spies." As if an Austrian 
 spy would advertise herself by publicly flaunting 
 the Austrian colours ! But a mob has a logic 
 of its own. 
 
 Among the more intimate of their fellow- 
 students at Leipzig, and the most frequent guests 
 at their mother's hospitable supper-table there — 
 a highly popular institution among a cosmopolitan 
 flock of young people mostly with appetites too 
 big for their pockets— was the future Sir Arthur 
 Sullivan, as notable then for easy charm of 
 manner, and adaptability to all sorts and con- 
 ditions of persons and circumstances, as when he 
 became no less welcome a guest at royal tables. 
 It may interest some who only saw him in after 
 years to learn that he was golden-curled in his 
 student days, and this in spite of the strong strain 
 of African blood that became increasingly per- 
 ceptible with increasing age. He was, in fact, 
 an Octoroon, and was accordingly subjected to 
 194 
 
Arthur Seymour Sullivan 
 
 inconveniences and annoyances during his visit 
 to the United States which permanently embittered 
 him against Americans and American ways. I 
 never saw much of him, for when my then future 
 wife came home after some years in Italy he had 
 already soared into social planes far above ours. 
 But he never forgot, or at any rate never seemed 
 to forget, the old Leipzig life when reminded of 
 it by one who had also lived it ; and in some 
 talks I had with him about my supplying him 
 with a libretto (I quite forget the proposed sub- 
 ject ; but that it was essentially un-Gilbertian I 
 need not remember in order to know), I thought 
 I discovered the secret of his charm. It was the 
 tact with which he flattered one's vanity by 
 treating one as if of paramount and exclusive 
 interest to Arthur Sullivan. Of course one was 
 nothing of the kind, and knew it ; but he made 
 one feel pleased with oneself, and therefore with 
 him. 
 
 Of at least one libretto I was already the author 
 — that of Sir Frederick Cowen's " The Rose- 
 Maiden," a very free adaptation from a German 
 poem by Horn. That Cantata was Cowen's first 
 publicly performed work, and was conducted by 
 the composer at the age of eighteen. Since then, 
 for many years, I was his librettist and song-writer 
 io ordinary ; and I can no more catalogue the 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 verse that I turned out in that capacity, poeticised 
 by his music, than the musicians that I en- 
 countered at his father's and mother's in 
 Warwick Crescent. My impression is that these 
 were just — all ; nor do I think the impression 
 very wrong, except in the matter of chronology, 
 which it altogether defies. I have tried to reduce 
 it to something like order, but cannot, still as a 
 matter of impression, realise any difference of 
 date between Mme. Purepa Rosa and Paderewski, 
 though I find that, in bare fact, the former died 
 in 1874, and the latter did not come to London 
 till 1892. On the whole it will be best to leave 
 the impression of much music rendered by many 
 performers, untrammelled by the formalities of 
 theatre or concert-room, to its undefined haze. I 
 do, however, remember very definitely indeed the 
 interest to myself in meeting and hearing, off the 
 boards, and as an actual fellow-creature, the 
 central heroine of my sometime operatic fever, 
 Mme. Trebelli-Bettini, a propos of whom I re- 
 member, too, the performance of a toy symphony 
 in which she showed signal proficiency on the 
 drum. George Grossmith, also — originally 
 " Junior" as the son of his father, subsequently 
 ** Senior " as the father of his son — was very 
 much to the fore ; as, for that matter, he always 
 was wherever I met him. He was certainly a 
 196 
 
George Grossmith 
 
 prime favourite of Nature in point of grotesque- 
 ness, and I think that, as a thoroughly 
 conscientious artist, he did his best to improve 
 her favours. I remember once, in all the 
 publicity of Regent Street, noticing the approach 
 of a more or less human face that seemed under- 
 going an extraordinary course of spasmodic 
 grins, such that it required quite a near meeting 
 to identify George Grossmith with the grinner. 
 It can hardly have been his habit to rehearse 
 effects in public thoroughfares, though it 
 would certainly be one way of not depriving 
 Art of the precious minutes that are its due. 
 But I have known a yet greater master of facial 
 expression than he — a young Irish physician who 
 had devoted some of his attention to investigating 
 the extent to which certain of the involuntary 
 muscles and sinews (if that be the technically 
 correct term), such as those of the nose or the 
 ear, can be trained to voluntary exercise. He 
 had so far succeeded as to be able to transform 
 his features, at will, into those of a veritable 
 gargoyle, caricaturing whatever passion or emotion 
 he pleased. On the scientific value of his experi- 
 ments I am not qualified to form an opinion. But 
 they might, in bedside practice, be useful for 
 entertaining a patient whom there was no risk 
 of their terrifying, or in cases of lunacy, if only 
 
 197 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 the doctor could be quite sure of not being mis- 
 taken for the patient. 
 
 Sir Frederick Cowen himself is happily ex- 
 cluded from the scope of these reminiscences, 
 inasmuch as he and his sisters are among the very- 
 good friends of the present as well as of the past, 
 with this new Georgian period still well before 
 them, and destined, I trust, so far from ever 
 taking a place among my mere memories, to afford 
 me one in theirs. I wish I had the same reason 
 for excluding the genial personality of Charles 
 Salaman, whose portion of a house in Baker 
 Street was another musical resort, but of a more 
 limited kind than the Cowens' — more of a defi- 
 nite coterie. A pianist of an exquisitely delicate 
 and expressive touch, so natural to him as to 
 make him scornful of systems of technique, 
 holding that the poet of the keys can no more 
 be manufactured than the poet of words, his 
 teaching was unquestionably, by the evidence of 
 results, an inspiring influence in the case of 
 pupils with a ready-made facility of finger and 
 a capacity for being inspired. He seemed to me 
 to regard Music less as an end in itself than as 
 his own personal means of poetical expression 
 — witness the composition which will, to that 
 extent at least, carry his name forward in com- 
 pany with Shelley's, his setting of the song, " I 
 198 
 
Charles Kensington Salaman 
 
 arise from dreams of thee." As a young man 
 with good means and introductions — he never 
 passed through the school of Art kept by that 
 rigorous task-mistress, Poverty — he had made a 
 long visit to Rome. It was in the days of the old 
 regime, before changes had so much as begun 
 to forecast a shadow ; yet in no wise did his 
 race and creed affect his welcome into such pre- 
 sumably unlikely centres as those having Cardinals 
 for their centres. He was proud of being a Jew, 
 and a Jew of the Sephardim, the aristocracy of 
 the Jews. 
 
 Mendelssohn was still \}a^ genius locioi Leipzig 
 in my wife's time. But now, in the 'seventies, 
 even in slowly moving London, the Wagnerian 
 crusade against " Judaism in music" was spread- 
 ing, and persons who wished to pose as superior 
 were getting to feel that to admire Mendelssohn's 
 music too warmly was no longer quite the thing. 
 Among those who uncompromisingly held it to be 
 not the thing at all was Walter Bache, a fellow- 
 student of my wife and her sister, who, faithless 
 to the spirit of his alma mater, appointed himself 
 Peter the Hermit to the crusade. Indeed, he 
 soon outran the vanguard of the revolt, for 
 having convinced himself that the imminent 
 triumph of Wagner was secure, he next appointed 
 himself missionary extraordinary to the Abbe 
 
 199 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Listz, as a composer more in need of a champion. 
 Without any conspicuous musical ability of his 
 own, or the least particle of ambition or vanity, 
 or taint of self-advertisement, he threw heart and 
 soul into the hopeless task of forcing Liszt's 
 compositions upon a public that was still quar- 
 relling over Wagner's. His Liszt recitals meant, 
 1 take it, throwing his purse after them ; but he 
 would not grudge that to the cause. No doubt 
 the joy of battle was to some extent motive 
 enough, for he was a born rebel all round, and 
 nothing pleased him better than the fun of shocking 
 a " Philistine" ; but there could be no misreading 
 the honest simplicity of his zeal. To hear him 
 talk, as we often did, for he was a frequent visitor, 
 and not more frequent than welcome, one would 
 think that the situation was that of Walter Bache 
 pitted against all the shams and conventions of 
 the world. But he was an entirely lovable 
 fellow, through and through, and when he died, 
 worn out by sheer excess of life before he could 
 be called middle-aged, I can answer for it that all 
 his knight-errantry had not given him one single 
 enemy, unless he himself were the one. The 
 wonder is that he was not worn out yet sooner, 
 for he was a painstaking teacher of the pianoforte, 
 in large practice, all day ; a boon companion all 
 night ; and a zealous musical missionary all the 
 200 
 
Walter Bache 
 
 time. He had a way of making a ride on horse- 
 back do duty for sleep between the late end of 
 the night and the early beginning of the day. 
 It may encourage some shy connoisseurs, who 
 do not care to own up to an old-fashioned liking 
 for mere melody, that so advanced a champion 
 of the advanced school — advanced even before 
 Wagner was in the van — delighted in Offenbach 
 openly and without an atom of shame. Moreover, 
 I have it on his authority that Wagner himself — 
 and he knew Wagner well — loved above all else 
 the arie of Bellini. 
 
 It may well be that Schumann was no false 
 prophet when he declared that, whatever may be 
 the music of the present, the Music of the Future 
 will have been composed by Haydn, Mozart, 
 Beethoven. 
 
 201 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 "Zelda" — Francis Hindes Groom — Gypsies at Mawgan 
 — Charles Godfrey Leland — The Hardys — John Cordy 
 Jeafifreson— " Joaquin " Miller— No. 84, Gower Street 
 —Agnes Mary Frances Robinson — The -(Esthetes — 
 "Speranza" — Professor William Minto — Justin M'Carthy 
 
 At the very end of 1872 I was asked by Leslie 
 Stephen, who had succeeded his father-in-law, 
 Thackeray, as editor of the Cornhilly to write 
 a novel for that magazine to run through the 
 following year. I had not so much as the idea 
 of a plot or subject in my mind : so, with a 
 reckless courage at which I can now only wonder, 
 I wrote the first monthly instalment without the 
 ghost of a notion of what could or would follow. 
 And even so it went on from month to month 
 — and anxious months, I need hardly say, they 
 were. If ever novel was acted out by its 
 characters, without taking even their own author 
 into their confidence as to what they would do 
 next, or what would happen to them, or how they 
 would end, it was " Zelda's Fortune." Zelda 
 herself sprang from the title, not the title from 
 Zelda ; nor the title from the plot, but the plot 
 202 
 
" Zelda " 
 
 from the title. All that I seemed to have to do 
 with the matter was that, having recently started 
 a keen interest in Romany history and language, 
 I had a presentiment that my leading lady would 
 prove to be a Gypsy, and that a name so out- 
 landish, in addition to its merits of being short, 
 incapable of being mispronounced, and reasonably 
 safe from any previous claim, would somehow 
 lit her ; or at any rate that she would somehow 
 fit the name. One good " Fortune " she had — 
 to have her story illustrated by Du Maurier. He 
 must have received each monthly instalment of 
 copy inconveniently late, but he never com- 
 plained, and his care to render his drawings real 
 illustrations of their texts was evidenced in a 
 rather curious way. We had no acquaintance 
 with him — not even so much as can be referred 
 to a chance encounter in a crowded room. Yet 
 when, many years afterwards, such a chance 
 encounter did happen, he no sooner set eyes 
 on my wife than he exclaimed "Zelda!" He 
 had followed my description of my heroine so 
 exactly as to have made an excellent portrait (as 
 we ourselves had been amused to notice from the 
 first) of one whom he had never seen, and who 
 in no respect belonged to the type that he made 
 distinctly his own. 
 
 The introduction of some scraps of Romany 
 
 203 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 into the dialofjue of the novel brougrht me a letter 
 from Francis Hindes Groom, not yet the author 
 of "In Gypsy Tents," but already qualified for 
 more than he ever accomplished as the most 
 complete master that ever existed of the whole 
 fascinating subject, in all its branches, in which 
 he was utterly absorbed. The letter led to a 
 correspondence, and this to a visit from him, 
 followed by a further correspondence extending 
 over some years, and to further visits on the rare 
 occasions when the vagabond life that he had 
 chosen brought him to London. I believe that 
 he must have had some strong strain of Gypsy 
 blood in his own veins, however little one would 
 expect it in the son of a highly respected arch- 
 deacon ; and the suspicion is confirmed by his 
 peculiarly soft voice and sombre Southern com- 
 plexion. Unlike the learned Professor A. F. 
 Pott, of Halle, who wrote his more than a 
 thousand pages on the Romany language without 
 ever having heard a word of it spoken, he had 
 lived with the Gypsies as one of themselves in 
 many countries, and talked with them as one of 
 themselves — only probably a good deal better. 
 I have a big bundle of his letters, written from 
 various points in his wanderings at home and 
 abroad, but their topics are too exclusively 
 philological to be of interest here. The last, 
 204 
 
Francis Hindes Groom 
 
 however, written from some out-of-the-world place 
 in Hungary, concludes by telling how he had 
 been invited by his companions there to join in 
 a horse-stealing expedition. Whether he accepted 
 the invitation I know not ; but, if so, any penalty 
 that he incurred was as nothing in comparison 
 with the result of marrying a Gypsy girl — as he 
 did : with a speedy divorce to follow, the co- 
 respondent being of her own tribe. I had, 
 however, lost sight of him and touch with him 
 before this part of his story : not with intention 
 or for any definite reason, but in the natural 
 course of divergent lives. Should I ever put 
 forth my own speculations concerning the origin 
 and language of the Gypsies, I shall dedicate 
 them to his memory, as a pupil to a master's. 
 
 Whatever they may be worth — and, though 
 I am entirely convinced of their soundness, they 
 were evolved too late to obtain any assurance of 
 my master's approbation — I shall not be alto- 
 gether in the position of Professor Pott of Halle, 
 who, as he himself told Groom, had never ex- 
 changed a word with one of the race whose 
 language he subjected to a truly Germanic depth 
 of learning. One experience of mine is curious, 
 not as a linguistic adventure, but as evidence of 
 a belief that was new to me at the time, and that 
 I have not come across since among instances 
 
 205 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 of folk-lore. In the course of a ramble in 
 Cornwall, early one sunny afternoon, I was 
 accosted somewhere near Mawgan by two men 
 who suddenly appeared out of a neighbouring 
 thicket : one middle-aged, the other young — they 
 might be, to judge from their dress and likeness, 
 a gamekeeper and his son. But a moment's look 
 showed that, while the likeness might be due to 
 relationship, it was certainly due to identity of 
 race, and of a race that is not much by way of 
 breeding gamekeepers : rather the other thing. 
 " Sir," asked the elder, abruptly, but quite civilly, 
 and with unmistakable anxiety, " can you read ?" 
 It was surely the queerest of questions to be 
 suddenly put, without preface, by a couple of 
 Gypsies to a casual stranger ; and all the queerer 
 for the obvious importance of what the answer 
 might be. "A little," I answered. "Why.?" 
 " Then you'll come ! There's a poor fellow down 
 yonder can't pass — there's none of us can read." 
 
 I looked a' request to the younger man for 
 something a little more lucid, and not in vain. 
 It seemed that a family of the Lees (nearly all 
 the Gypsies of southern England, are, or were 
 Lees) was camping hard by, and that one of them 
 was terribly ill — indeed, his folk, of whom there 
 were two, had been told by the doctor from 
 St. Columb that he was dying. "Hard liver" 
 206 
 
Gypsies at Mawgan 
 
 was the name of his sickness — which would mean, 
 I suppose, that, whatever his virtues, sobriety had 
 not been among them. But he was in great pain, 
 and was dying hard : nor could he be released 
 from pain by death unless and until he was 
 " read " over — and there was not man, woman, or 
 child in the camp who knew how. So these two 
 kinsfolk of the sufferer had been on the look-out 
 for some sufficiently learned passer-by. 
 
 Of course I went with them to the camp. It 
 was pitched on sward, between a copse and a 
 stream, and was on an unusually large scale. 
 Every generation seemed crowded together, from 
 the crone who looked as if she had seen her 
 hundredth birthday many years ago to the baby 
 in arms, with every age of both sexes between. 
 In solemn silence they squatted round a central 
 caravan : in solemn silence they rose for an 
 instant and curtseyed or bowed as I was brought 
 upon the scene. Without a word my younger 
 guide conducted me to the steps of the caravan, 
 and then left me to enter it alone. It seemed to 
 be taken for granted that I, who could read, would 
 know what to do. 
 
 Not the boudoir of the most fastidious of 
 princesses could be more ideally clean and neat 
 than the interior of that vagrant caravan. The 
 face of the sick man I could not see, for it was 
 
 207 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 turned to the wall : I could only hear his heavily 
 and I fear painfully drawn breathing as he lay in 
 his clean white shirt under a clean white sheet 
 among clean white pillows. He did not seem 
 aware of my presence. What was I to do, to 
 satisfy the affectionate sorrow of the expectant 
 crowd outside ? 
 
 I believe I did what was right. Very solemnly 
 and slowly, and aloud, so that all might hear, 
 I said the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 I suppose I might plausibly be charged with 
 having perverted the prayer of prayers to the 
 support of pagan superstition. To that charge 
 I plead neither "guilty" nor "not guilty" — I 
 decline to plead at all. After many hand-shakes, 
 in one case accompanied by a sob from the folds 
 of a scarlet shawl, I went on my way. It 
 was dark when, returning to my quarters at 
 St. Columb, I came again to the point of the road 
 where I had been first accosted, and naturally 
 turned aside to make a visit of inquiry. The 
 camp, now fire-lighted, had not shifted, but it was 
 no longer silent. Women's voices would have 
 served for guidance to it had there been no fires, 
 and when I reached it, the cause of the clatter 
 was plain ; but not a man was to be seen. Grief 
 is notoriously thirsty — is not " Thirsty grief" 
 classically authorised by Lovelace's prison-song ? 
 208 
 
Charles Godfrey Leland 
 
 —and there would be beer at Mawgan : sorrow 
 must not interfere with business, and there might 
 be snares to visit in the fields. Well — I did not 
 lack for voluble information that scarcely had 
 I left the caravan that afternoon when the sick 
 man died. To try to explain that he was pro- 
 bably at the last gasp when I saw him, and that 
 there was thus no necessary connection between 
 prayer and its purpose, would have been useless ; 
 against their power or will to understand. Be- 
 sides, what did I know ? — except that they, in 
 their hearts, had prayed for a brother's release 
 from the pain of living ; that I had given their 
 wordless wish a vocal form ; and that the release 
 had come. Coldly to explain that away ! I 
 could not if I would : I would not if I could. 
 Probably the belief that the soul cannot achieve 
 a difficult death without magic, that is to say 
 scholarship, to help it, has itself died out by now. 
 But I cannot but suspect myself of some com- 
 plicity in making it die somewhat harder than it 
 ought — at least among the Lees. 
 
 Once only was it my good fortune to discuss 
 Romany with one of its most eminent students, 
 Charles Godfrey Leland, not as yet forgotten as 
 " Hans Breitmann," nor as yet fully recognised 
 as the light-bearer of folk-lore into so many pre- 
 P 209 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 viously neglected corners of unwritten history. 
 But the once was a whole evening long, and had 
 some controversial zest : for he was a thorough 
 adherent, I as thorough an opponent, of the view 
 that refers the Gypsies to an Indian origin. Our 
 conversation took place in the drawing-room of 
 Lady Hardy, wife of Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, 
 the Deputy Keeper of Records, where she, with 
 her daughter Isa — both successful novel-writers — 
 held a literary court of the same open sort as the 
 Marstons, until the death of Sir Thomas brought 
 that, also, to an end. The memory of one friend- 
 ship that I made there I especially prize : that of 
 John Cordy Jeaffreson, antiquary and all-round 
 man of letters, whose bristles of prejudice and 
 paradox entirely failed to hide from those who 
 knew him the sweetness and warmth of the heart 
 that he seemed ashamed to show. Cincinnatus — 
 by substitution " Joaquin " — H. Miller, called the 
 " Poet of the Sierras," was, during his visits to 
 this country during the earlier half of the seven- 
 ties, a conspicuous member of the Hardys' circle, 
 where notable Americans were especially wel- 
 come, and, there and elsewhere, a privileged 
 exponent of what were supposed to be wild 
 Western ways. He was expected to be startlingly 
 unconventional ; and he was not so churlish as to 
 disappoint expectation. 
 210 
 
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson 
 
 A more comprehensive circle, even than the 
 Marstons*, was that which had for its focus 
 No 84, Gower Street, while the abode of 
 Mr. and Mrs. George Robinson — I remember 
 the precise address of their house, because my 
 father-in-law was its immediately preceding 
 tenant ; because I had first seen my future wife 
 there ; and because it had been our own dwelling 
 for the first months of our marriage. George 
 Robinson was an expert art-collector : a con- 
 noisseur who understood both artistic merits and 
 artistic values. But his whole collection con- 
 tained nothing so attractive as his eldest daughter, 
 Agnes Mary Frances, who has made a name, or 
 rather three names, in two nations : first as Mary 
 Robinson ; secondly as Madame James Dar- 
 mesteter ; thirdly — which she still retains — as 
 Madame Duclaux. It is many, many years since 
 I saw her : the distance of Paris, meaning by 
 Paris not its railway stations but itself, is not 
 a matter of mere miles or hours. So my whole 
 memory of her is of a beautiful girl of eighteen 
 who — age not being a matter of mere months and 
 years — never seemed to grow older ; who, from 
 her birth, had breathed only poetic air ; and 
 knew nothing of life but its graceful and gracious 
 sides. Fortunately her gift was too genuine and 
 her taste too sound to be seriously or permanently 
 
 211 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 injured! in the way that was to be feared — that 
 of the so-called "aesthetic" influence which was 
 beginning to infect her atmosphere with its 
 affectations at just about the time when her first 
 volume, " A Handful of Honeysuckle," celebrated 
 her coming of age. 
 
 The " aesthetic movement " is, and always was, 
 the vaguest of terms, and its place and office in 
 literary history have yet to be defined before 
 these can be settled and assigned ; but, like every 
 " movement," it had its grotesqueries and ab- 
 surdities, which were by no means mere inventions 
 of Du Maurier, as the present generation of 
 students o{ PuncJts Mid- Victorian numbers might 
 naturally take them to be. I have seen at the 
 Robinsons' a youth (whose name was neither 
 Postlethwaite nor Mawdle, though it might well 
 have been either) carrying throughout a whole 
 evening, in melancholy silence, a tall white lily, 
 with whose droop he was evidently doing his best 
 to bring his own figure into imitation. At the 
 same house, a young woman, dressed, as it seemed 
 to me, in nothing but an old-fashioned bathing 
 gown and an amber necklace, whom I was asked 
 to take to the supper-room, returned, to my 
 inquiry of what I could get for her, the lugubri- 
 ously toned answer, " I seldom eat." And these 
 three words were all I could win from her then 
 212 
 
" Speranza " 
 
 or thereafter. Whether it was here that I first 
 met Oscar Wilde, I am not sure. Wherever it 
 was, the acquaintanceship failed to ripen, beyond 
 occasional invitations to his mother's receptions, 
 held in a depressing half-light, arranged to her 
 liking, though in the day-time, by lowered lamps 
 and drawn blinds. Lady Wilde, "Speranza" of 
 the paper, the Nation, in which her patriotic 
 verses originally appeared, was a delightfully 
 quaint person. The twilight in which she chose 
 to be seen seemed to be that of a dream, she 
 being the dreamer and we the shadows, so that 
 no oddity could come as a surprise, whether to us 
 or to her. She once introduced my wife and 
 myself to each other as " two clever people who 
 ought to be acquainted." She knew us both, 
 especially my wife, quite well, and I do not 
 suppose that she took either of us for anybody 
 else. We were no doubt for the moment just 
 dream objects, without substance or name. I 
 could find nothing better to say than " I think I 
 have had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Francillon 
 before." 
 
 It was at the Robinsons' that I especially 
 remember an exceedingly interesting talk — that 
 is to say on his side of it — with Professor William 
 Minto, then editing the Examiner, who did such 
 admirably efficient pioneer work in literary history 
 
 213 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 and criticism on scientific lines in prae-scientific 
 times. Justin M'Carthy, novelist, politician, 
 historian, and journalist, with his wife — she 
 magnificently crowned with a wealth of snow- 
 white hair — his daughter, and the son who has 
 continued the literary dynasty as Justin the 
 Second, were also among the most frequent of 
 the visitors at 84, Gower Street, and were pre- 
 sumably in part accountable for a sentimental 
 sympathy with Irish Nationalism that made itself 
 felt in the domestic air. Mary Robinson's younger 
 sister Mabel was especially attracted by the 
 romance of Irish history, though it was as a 
 novelist of wider range that she won immediate 
 distinction at a notably early age. Theirs was 
 altogether a singularly interesting household — 
 permanently interesting in itself, and gathering all 
 manner of varied interest from outside. While 
 one might safely predict the friends of one's own 
 whom one would meet there, it was impossible to 
 hazard a guess as to the strangers whom one 
 might encounter ; from members of the Chinese 
 Legation (two of them once sang a most feline 
 duet) to Monsignor Capel — also in full costume. 
 
 214 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 The GentleinarCs — Richard Gowing — David Christie 
 Murray — Robert Buchanan — Welsh humour — Gustave 
 Dore — Camille Barere — Karl and Mathilde Blind 
 
 The death of Zelda— whom I had reluctantly had 
 to poison, as the only possible solution of the tangle 
 in which she and her fellow-characters had be- 
 come involved, not by me, but by their own 
 independence of control — was made the more 
 memorable to myself by a call in person from 
 Richard Gowing, the newly appointed editor of 
 the Gentlemans Magazine, then published by 
 Grant & Co., for the purpose of getting a novel 
 to run through the twelve months of 1874. I had 
 no previous acquaintance with him, but this purely 
 business interview resulted in a close and constant 
 literary connection fourteen years long, and in a 
 personal intimacy that lasted without break or 
 cloud until his death after many years more. Of 
 all the friendships that I have made in all my life, 
 there is none that I can look back upon with more 
 flawless satisfaction. Do you, who are reading 
 this, know what it is to receive a letter which you 
 
 215 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 not merely hope or expect, but know, from the 
 handwriting on the envelope, will make you the 
 happier for reading ? I do, thanks to Richard 
 Gowing, and never once was my experience at 
 fault during an ample correspondence of quite 
 thirty years. No doubt I must have sometimes 
 tried his patience — what mortal author can fail to 
 try the patience of any mortal editor now and 
 again ? But I never knew him to appear put out 
 or worried, while on the other hand he never lost 
 an opportunity of showing himself pleased. And 
 for getting the best possible work out of any man 
 who is not exceptionally ill-conditioned, I am 
 convinced that there is no way that works so well. 
 The certain approbation of effort, even should 
 the effort fail, is far more likely to result 
 in success than is any anxiety to escape blame. 
 The excellence of my relations with Gowing was 
 certainly not due to sympathy in matters of 
 opinion, or even to community of interest in the 
 same things. No two friends ever more com- 
 pletely agreed so completely to differ. His politics 
 were Radical — of a rather old-fashioned type, 
 perhaps, but therefore all the more consistently 
 thorough ; mine, during our intercourse, tended 
 more and more to a historic Toryism, not neces- 
 sarily false in principle merely because practical 
 party politics have obscured it for a time. He 
 2l6 
 
Richard Gowing 
 
 was not only, as Secretary of the Cobden Club, 
 an official Free Trader, but a zealous and active 
 propagandist of a cause the right and wrong 
 whereof I, baffled by mutually contradictory 
 statistics, conflicting authorities, and equally pro- 
 bable arguments on both sides, understood as 
 little as I do now — which is just as much as the 
 average voter : which is nothing at all. He was 
 a Positivist : I a born Mystic, running wild until 
 I recognised in Authority the ultimate logic of a 
 natural need. In short, he and I together formed 
 a signal example of the harmony of extremes. 
 
 This time I took good care not to trust my 
 characters with the plot and conduct of my novel. 
 I drew out a complete plan of the story, chapter 
 by chapter, with the result that " Olympia," as 
 the finished novel was called, was scarcely to be 
 identified with its preliminary scheme. Those 
 perversely wilful creatures, one's dramatis personcB , 
 took themselves into their own hands after all. 
 But I had this important amount of control 
 over them — that they had a predetermined and 
 irrevocable plot to work out, however im- 
 possible it was to prevent them from working 
 it out in their own way. In any case they 
 are a troublesome folk to keep in order. I 
 quite recently had the interesting pleasure 
 oi discussing their management with a novelist 
 
 217 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 of to-day, and presumably of to-morrow also, 
 Miss Marion Mole. Her principle, as I gather, 
 is to study a person, or group of persons, whose 
 character or characters would inevitably dictate 
 his, her, or their story. That seems an ideally 
 admirable method, for a novelist who can trust 
 herself to know, with dramatic sympathy, how a 
 man or woman of given character would the 
 most certainly act or feel under given conditions. 
 Mine, since " Olympia," has been just the reverse 
 — to start from a single situation ; then to evolve 
 a story capable of bringing it about ; and finally 
 to invent the characters necessary for the action. 
 That also is not a bad way of getting and keeping 
 a grip over one's actors ; but it has the fault of 
 exacting a cold-blooded ingenuity which, even 
 when most successful, is apt, in a much more 
 important matter, to fail. Sympathy with cha- 
 racters originally made to order, though, as they 
 develop, not out of the question, cannot by any 
 amount of ingenuity be ensured. The latter 
 method throws the main interest of a novel upon 
 what its characters do ; but the former upon what 
 they are. I have let myself run into this digres- 
 sion because I believe that it recognises the 
 existence of two essentially distinct kinds of 
 fiction, and that much critical confusion results 
 from condemning a novel of one kind for not 
 2i8 
 
The Gentlema?t's Magazine 
 
 being of the other. Of course the two separate 
 interests, the narrative and the dramatic, have, in 
 some rare cases, been chemically combined. But, 
 when that happens, the only proper function of a 
 critic is to bow to the ground. 
 
 Towards the end of the year through which 
 " Olympia " ran her course, 1874, appeared the 
 first of the series of one-volume novels that 
 constituted the Christmas number of The Gentle- 
 mans Magazine for fifteen successive years. Of 
 twelve of these I was the sole author : of the 
 other three I devised the plot and wrote the 
 greater portion. In " Like a Snowball," the 
 earliest on the list, I had for collaborateurs David 
 Christie Murray, "Frank Percival " (the pen- 
 name of a lady whom I never met, and whose 
 real name I can neither recall nor recover), and 
 " Redspinner " — who, no angler need be told, 
 was, in private life, William Senior, sometime 
 editor of the Field. Was — and is, for only the 
 other day I met him, very much alive, and 
 evidently without the least intention of turning 
 into anybody's mere memory, dear to his family 
 and friends (I cannot answer for the fishes) as so 
 genial and manly a memory will be. Each of 
 these contributed one of the seven chapters : I 
 the other four. Of David Christie Murray, the 
 author of "Joseph's Coat" and several other 
 
 219 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 popularly successful novels, I came to see a great 
 deal. The first visit I had from him began at 
 ten o'clock at night, and lasted till past three in 
 the morning. Nobody else was present : I was 
 the entire audience of a monologue the whole of 
 those five full hours long — and not once was I 
 bored, though I confess to a gathering fear that 
 mere physical fatigue must sooner or later extort 
 an inhospitable yawn. At last he rose to go. 
 There was no apparent reason why a man who 
 had talked without a pause for five hours should 
 not go on talking for ten ; but go he did. And 
 " What a delightful conversation we have been 
 having ! " said he at the front-door. But it takes 
 two, at the least, for conversation, and I know 
 that beyond an occasional " Yes " or " Oh," or 
 some such note of attention, I had not uttered a 
 word. 
 
 His was certainly an unforgettable personality : 
 and yet I scarcely know in what terms to re- 
 member him. I sometimes used to doubt if he 
 had any character at all of his very own ; 
 whether it was not a psychological necessity for 
 him to imagine himself somebody else, and to 
 think and talk in accordance with his adopted 
 role. He had been a fervent disciple of George 
 Dawson, of Birmingham, and I got to know, 
 from a certain tone of voice and other mannerisms, 
 220 
 
David Christie Murray 
 
 when he happened to be George Dawson. On 
 his return from service as war-correspondent at 
 the siege of Plevna he carried some information 
 concerning the Atrocities to Hawarden ; and 
 thenceforth certain other mannerisms and tones 
 were obviously symptomatic of Gladstone. He 
 was never, I am convinced, just David Christie 
 Murray, though who he was at the moment, in 
 less eminent instances, one could not always tell ; 
 and his talent for assimilating and reproducing 
 tricks of speech aided this curious form of self- 
 deception. He was, to the very life, Scotsman, 
 Irishman, or Cockney, at will. That his novels 
 reflected the personality of Dickens is evident 
 beyond question. His experiences, partly set 
 out in his own volume of reminiscences, were 
 almost as versatile as his impersonations. Com- 
 positor ; reporter both on country papers and in 
 the " Gallery " ; dragoon ; tramp ; now with a 
 chateau in the Riviera, now hard put to it for a 
 lodging in London ; war-correspondent ; novel- 
 ist ; actor — •' everything by turns, and nothing 
 long," he had three superlative talents. One was 
 for " picturesque " journalism ; another was for 
 throwing away every consequent opportunity ; 
 a third for alienating his friends. No— he had 
 two more. One was for never being without 
 a fresh opportunity to throw away ; the other, 
 
 221 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 that which Goldsmith ascribes to Garrick, 
 who — 
 
 Cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack, 
 
 For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back. 
 
 I should summarise him as a medley of moods 
 and impulses, none of which he ever con- 
 trolled, not exactly out of weakness, but because 
 it honestly never occurred to him to control 
 them. Nor was his often eloquent sentimentality, 
 however inconsistent with ensuing conduct, to 
 be termed hypocrisy. It was that he was one 
 person when sentimentalising — Dawson, or 
 Gladstone, or Dickens, or whoever else it might 
 be : another in action. I could not like, much 
 less admire, him. But I liked his company, and 
 that I keenly admired that picturesque journalism 
 of his I became able to prove in a practical way. 
 
 In the Annual for 1875 I was given the 
 collaboration of Senior for one of the seven 
 chapters, and of Robert Buchanan for a poem 
 to be written in such wise as to harmonise with 
 my plot ; indeed to be one of its essential portions. 
 That part of the plan did not strike me as 
 promising. I had never met the poet, and I 
 was considerably prejudiced against him per- 
 sonally by my association with the circle of 
 Swinburne and Rossetti. I recalled certain advice 
 222 
 
Robert Buchanan 
 
 that had once been given me : "If you are ever 
 introduced to Buchanan, knock him down then 
 and there. You'll have to do it sooner or later ; 
 so it'll be best to get it over as soon as you can." 
 Well, there was nothing for it but to send him 
 the subject of my story, with a deferential sug- 
 gestion (one does not dictate to poets) that, as 
 the scene was to be laid in Merionethshire, he 
 might find inspiration in the legend of the Fairy 
 city at the bottom of the Lake of Bala. That 
 would have suited me very well indeed. His 
 answer is among a few letters that have contrived 
 to escape loss or destruction ; and I give it here, 
 partly out of vanity, partly because it is so unlike 
 any that my mental portrait of the writer had 
 allowed me to look for : — 
 
 " Mv DEAR Sir, — I am obliged to you for your 
 kind letter concerning the ' Legend.' I see 
 no difficulty just now — if any occurs to me 
 afterwards you shall know — of incorporating in 
 it the elements you suggest ; and the Bala Lake 
 Tradition, too, might be utilised. But, in truth, 
 I have hardly yet had leisure to shape the plan 
 definitely. When I do so I will follow your views 
 as far as I can. 
 
 " I presume Mr. Gowing has told you that the 
 authorship is to be, and to continue, anonymous, 
 so far as I am concerned. I have undertaken it 
 
 223 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 chiefly with a wish to oblige him and the pro- 
 prietors of the magazine. 
 
 " May I take this opportunity of saying how 
 much I enjoyed your ' Olympia ' — nearly all of 
 which I read in the magazine ? Your article on 
 * Physiology of Authorship ' entertained me 
 greatly ; but in the story I found a charm and 
 freshness very unusual in modern fiction. I hope 
 the ' Legend ' will be worthy of its * setting ' by 
 you ; and, believe me, I am 
 
 " Very truly yours, 
 
 " Robert Buchanan." 
 
 Now how on earth could the recipient of such 
 a letter dream of knocking its writer down ? 
 Especially as there were certain physical obstacles 
 to the process, for Buchanan was then living in 
 a remote part of Connaught, whence the letter 
 was dated ; and, when I afterwards met him in 
 person, it needed no second look to show me 
 that, should it ever come to blows between us, 
 it was I, not he, who would come to the floor. 
 Meanwhile, with an easy mind, I betook myself 
 to Dolgelly to lay in a stock of local colour ; put 
 myself there under the tuition of a mining agent, 
 so as to be accurate in the details of gold-ex- 
 traction, on which the story was to turn ; climbed 
 down, for both purposes, into the depths of the 
 Clogau Mine, then being worked for gold ; and 
 224 
 
Welsh Humoiif 
 
 failed to find any traces of fairies in or about 
 Bala. But I succeeded in losing myself on Cader 
 Idris so well that I think there must be fairies 
 there — and of a kindly sort too, for without some 
 such invisible guidance I must inevitably have 
 spent a hungry night in the mazes of the mountain 
 instead of the comfortable quarters of the Golden 
 Lion. By the way, it was here I made the passing 
 acquaintance of a young Englishman, a dropper-in 
 on most days, who, in the course of a casual chat 
 on the Welsh character generally, undertook to 
 prove, beyond all possible question, that its most 
 distinguishing peculiarity is the total and universal 
 absence of even a rudimentary sense of humour. 
 He was always accompanied by a fine retriever, 
 coal black, and without a single white hair. 
 " Whenever any Welshman," said he, " asks my 
 dog's name, and I tell him * Eira,' he invariably 
 protests, ' Oh, but your tog iss plack ; and Eira 
 means Snow ! ' — Now," he went on to argue, 
 " is there any English, Scotch, or Irish baby 
 who would want an explanation of why a nigger 
 is nicknamed ' Snowball,' or the biggest of 
 Robin Hood's men ' Little ' John ? Anybody 
 who can't take in such simple, elementary humour 
 as that, clearly can't have any sense of humour 
 at all." Any Welshman who may happen to 
 read this will do me the justice to note that the 
 9 225 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 looric, and all else, are Eira's master's : not 
 
 mine. 
 
 Not until the very latest allowable moment did 
 Buchanan's poem arrive ; and then, to my dismay, 
 it would no more incorporate with my story than 
 oil with water, while the story, being more than 
 half written, could not possibly be adapted to the 
 poem, if only for want of time. He had evidently 
 forgotten all my requirements and suggestions, 
 and had written " The Changeling" a propos of 
 nothing but his own inspiration. I had got some- 
 thing infinitely better than I had asked for, seeing 
 that " The Chang-eling-," with its later introduc- 
 tion, " The Asrai," lives and will live, whereas 
 the story of "Streaked with Gold," though the 
 cause of its birth, has been dead and buried these 
 nearly forty years. But I was anything but 
 grateful at the time : especially when the absolute 
 necessity of dragging it into the story somehow 
 compelled recourse to the clumsy and always 
 objectionable machinery of an irrelevant dream. 
 
 I first made the poet's personal acquaintance 
 at a supper-party at the Gowings', which also 
 included William Black, with " A Daughter of 
 Heth " still but four years old, and " A Princess 
 of Thule " only two ; Charles Gibbon, who had 
 come well towards the front with "In Silk 
 Attire " ; and Buchanan's young sister-in-law, 
 226 
 
The Real Robert Buchanan 
 
 Miss Harriett Jay, in the first flush of the success, 
 while she was still in her teens, of her novel 
 " The Queen of Connaught," and now famed 
 throughout the theatrical world as the fortunate 
 author of "When Knights were Bold." With 
 Buchanan himself my subsequent intercourse was 
 rather intermittent : at some periods it was much 
 or frequent, at others little or seldom ; it never 
 amounted to intimacy, but to amply sufficient 
 knowledge on my part to dissipate every pre- 
 judice, and to estimate the real Robert Buchanan. 
 The happiness of his home life was patent to 
 everybody who entered it. He was obviously 
 worshipped by his womankind, mother, wife, and 
 wife's sister who held the place of daughter, with 
 the worship not of fear, but of devoted affection 
 amply returned. He was possibly indeed over- 
 domesticated : it might have been better for him 
 had he cared to mingle more in a world less 
 absolutely his own. Gentleness and courtesy are 
 certainly ,not characteristic of the legendary 
 Buchanan, but of my recollection of him they as 
 certainly are ; nor did I so much as once hear 
 from this literary Ishmael an unkindly word. 
 Of envy, hatred, or malice, he was as incapable 
 as if there were no such things. Then how came 
 he to be a by-word for offensiveness and ferocity ? 
 That obvious question I cannot answer better 
 
 227 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 than by a quotation from a contribution of my 
 own to Miss Harriett Jay's Life of him : 
 
 " The right reading of Buchanan was, 
 I am convinced, that his very genius had 
 prevented him from outgrowing, or being 
 able to outgrow, the boyishness of the best 
 sort of boy. . . . And the grand note of the 
 best sort of boy is a sincere passion for 
 justice, or rather a consuming indignation 
 against injustice — the two things are not 
 exactly the same. The boy of whatever age 
 can never comprehend the coolness with 
 which the grown-up man of the world has 
 learned to take injustice as part and parcel 
 of the natural order of things, even when 
 himself the sufferer. The grown-up man 
 has learned the sound wisdom of not sending 
 indignation red-hot or white-hot to the post or 
 the press, but of waiting till it is cool enough 
 to insert into a barrel of gunpowder without 
 risk of explosion. But the boy rebels, and, 
 if he be among the great masters of language, 
 hurls it out hot and strong, in the belief that 
 no honest feelings can be so weak as to be 
 wounded by any honest words. Of course 
 he was wrong " — 
 
 Of course he ought to have always had somebody 
 at his elbow with sufficient influence to delay the 
 posting of indignation until to-morrow. To- 
 morrow would never have come. 
 
 The subsequent thirteen annuals were free 
 228 
 
Gustave Dore 
 
 from the anxieties of collaboration, and, except in 
 one case, from any mischance. The exceptional 
 mishap occurred to the manuscript of " Rare 
 Good Luck " : so entitled by what must have 
 been an ironical presentiment, inasmuch as it had 
 the Rare Bad Luck to share in the destruction of 
 the publishers' premises by fire. So, having no 
 other copy, I had to spend all the following 
 summer in re-writing the whole, as a holiday 
 task, from beginning to end. For the rest, my 
 connection with the Gentleman s was so uniformly 
 smooth and pleasant as to give but little matter 
 for more special reminiscence than such occasions, 
 for example, as a dinner at which the two brothers 
 who owned and published it were the hosts, and 
 the only guests besides Gowing and myself were 
 Edmund Yates and Gustave Dore. The latter's 
 homeward way and mine lay together for most of 
 the distance ; and in the course of the walk he 
 told me how, when he visited, for artistic 
 purposes, a place that was new to him, he made 
 a point of strictly abiding by his first impression. 
 It is in the first moment, he maintained, that one 
 gets the true character of a place or person : all 
 further observation only confuses and misleads. 
 His theory certainly goes far to explain his 
 practice, even if he did not bring his first impres- 
 sions with him ready made. 
 
 229 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Another Frenchman whom I occasionally met at 
 the Gowings' was Camille Barere. Him I chiefly 
 remember as indistinguishable from an English- 
 man in English speech, unless by an un-English 
 purity of accent and accuracy of grammar. Such an 
 accomplishment, carried to such perfection, must 
 I think have been unique on the part of one of 
 a nation notorious for its complacent deficiency 
 in the gift of tongues : though scarcely less rare, 
 I should imagine, must be such total linguistic 
 incapacity as that of a Frenchman whom I met 
 at an inn at Liskeard, who, though he had lived 
 in London for ten years, had not learned a single 
 word of English, and, without the help of an 
 interpreter, must have gone without his supper. 
 How or why he came to find himself at Liskeard 
 of all places, or how, being there, he ever got 
 away, is among life's major mysteries. More 
 frequent among the Gowings' many visitors, 
 mostly of the politics that were considered 
 daringly advanced in Mid-Victorian times, was 
 Karl Blind, interesting for his revolutionary 
 record, and for what one may call his position of 
 Doyen among the Republicans of all nations. 
 The interest he inspired was certainly not on the 
 surface. Stolid in looks, heavy in manner, slow 
 and sparing of speech, guttural of voice, with no 
 more touch of humour than Eira's master ascribed 
 230 
 
Karl and Mathilde Blind 
 
 to a Welshman, a stranger would take him for a 
 typical example of the popular notion of a German 
 professor. A stranger, though I met him often, 
 I continued to be : had I been a disciple no doubt 
 my portrait would have acquired more warmth of 
 colour. That stolid silence certainly concealed 
 an unsurpassed if not unequalled knowledge of 
 the inner history of all revolutionary Europe from 
 1848 onwards : a history, moreover, whereof, for 
 aught any outsider could tell, he might still be 
 among the makers. Meanwhile his deficiencies 
 in merely superficial interest were amply com- 
 pensated by its plentifulness on the part of 
 his step-daughter — I think I am accurate in the 
 relationship, though, if so, she bore her mother's 
 second husband's name instead of her father's. 
 Not that the interest excited by Mathilde Blind 
 was on the surface only, as a very short acquaint- 
 anceship sufficed to prove. She was something 
 of an esprit fort at a period when for a woman 
 to be such was, in England at least, more of a 
 distinction than a little earlier or a little later ; 
 her poetry, though, owing to her untimely death, 
 rather of high promise than of full achievement, 
 was characterised by a certain masculine vigour ; 
 and her intellectual attractiveness was such as to 
 place me, when I failed to credit her with feminine 
 charm, in a minority of One. 
 
 231 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 The Tatler of 1877-8—" Arthur Sketchley "—Swinburne's 
 only novel — Louis Diston Powles — Twelve years' work — 
 Novels and their titles — The "Oasis" — The mystery of 
 Archibald MacNeill — Regent's Park Terrace— Miss Eliza- 
 beth Philp — Dr. Franz Hueffer— Ralston — Miss Sheddon 
 — " Hugh Conway " — After-dinner speakers : Sir F, 
 Leighton, Edwin Arnold, Hepworth Dixon — Mrs. Charles 
 Dickens 
 
 Early in 1877, to which the lax chronology of 
 the previous chapters has brought me by now, I 
 was guilty of a blunder from the effects of which 
 I have never wholly recovered even to this day, 
 though it is six-and-thirty years ago. Louis 
 Diston Powles, a barrister with a fair amount of 
 practice in probate and divorce cases, had taken 
 it into his head that the proprietorship of a weekly 
 paper was a shorter cut to fortune than the Bar. 
 I had no previous knowledge of him when I 
 received an invitation to dinner at the St. 
 Stephen's Club in order to discuss with him and 
 others the prospects and arrangements of such 
 a venture. The well-attended dinner, at any 
 rate, was a success : and, when it broke up, I 
 found myself pledged to contribute social and 
 232 
 
Launching of the " Tatler " 
 
 literary articles to a weekly paper called the 
 Tatler, to be edited by George Rose, the creator, 
 under the name of Arthur Sketchley, of a then 
 well-known and often-quoted " Mrs. Brown," and 
 the vehicle of the opinions formed by that good 
 lady " at the play " and on other occasions. 
 Clement Scott took the post of dramatic critic ; 
 Richard Whiteing that of Paris correspondent ; 
 politics were undertaken by Hitchman, of the 
 Standard. Finance, and the other ordinary 
 topics of a •' weekly " of the period, were in no 
 less competent if less memorable hands, and, our 
 proprietor being provided with capital which 
 should have amply sufficed to carry the Tatler 
 well out of its infancy, there was no apparent 
 reason why it should not have prospered. Rose 
 did not occupy the editorial chair for more than 
 two or three weeks. Whether solely for bronchitic 
 reasons, as he alleged, or whether partially — for 
 he was a shrewd man of business — out of some 
 instinctive prudence, he retired ; and I was per- 
 suaded to succeed him. I do not think that I 
 made a bad editor. The rest of the staff remained 
 unchanged ; but I added to the regular contribu- 
 tors Julian Hawthorne, Mrs. Moulton, and David 
 Christie Murray. There was a very young lady, 
 too, a Miss Minnie Mackay, who made what I 
 understood was her literary d^but in the Tatler 
 
 233 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 with a series of light and lively " Cigarette 
 Papers," and is now Miss Marie Corelli. And — 
 what I considered a real triumph — I obtained 
 a novel, to run as a serial, from Algernon Charles 
 Swinburne. A novel — by Swinburne ! That 
 meant, in the 'seventies, the fortune of the journal 
 or magazine in which it should appear. I suppose 
 such a stroke of luck was too splendid to come off 
 in a world where undiluted good luck seems to be 
 against all the rules. Still I cannot but think 
 that the bad luck which spoiled everything was 
 too excessive to be fair. Everything depended 
 on the announcement of the author's name ; and 
 this the author suddenly and peremptorily refused 
 to allow. Not only so, but the secret was to be 
 sacredly kept by Powles and myself : it was not 
 even to ooze out : nor could he be prevailed upon 
 to modify the condition by anything we could 
 urge. Sic volo, sic j'zcbeo ; stet pro ratione voluntas 
 — that, in effect, was his argument ; while ours, 
 namely that ' we only want your novel for the sake 
 of your name,' was not one that could be stated in 
 plain terms. The novel had been accepted, 
 ostensibly at least, on its merits : so, finally, it 
 was upon its merits alone that we were compelled 
 to rely. What other course we could have taken, 
 in the case of a novel that the proprietor of the 
 Tatler had eagerly undertaken to publish and 
 
 234 
 
Swinburne's only Novel 
 
 pay for, is a complicated question to which I have 
 never been able to find a satisfactory answer. 
 At any rate nothing could have been more un- 
 satisfactory than the answer that we did find. 
 " A Year's Letters," by Mrs. Horace Manners, 
 ran its course, and fell as flat as we expected. 
 Who cared to pay threepence a week for a new 
 serial in a new paper by a new authoress of whom 
 nobody had ever heard ? If it could only have 
 got abroad that Mrs. Horace Manners was 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne! — the Tatler of 
 1877-8 might be flourishing in 1913. 
 
 "If" and "might" — but I am not writing of 
 those. Of course the secret was bound to ooze 
 out sooner or later ; but it was punctiliously kept 
 by us, and when I was told, as a matter of literary 
 curiosity, that Swinburne had once written a novel 
 called " A Year's Letters," the Tatler had been 
 dead for years. I do not mean to say that 
 Swinburne's caprice was even indirectly fatal. It 
 prevented a great immediate success ; but could 
 not have hindered the sort that is certainly slow 
 and possibly sure. That sort was prevented by 
 a process that is certainly sure and probably swift 
 — a premature failure of funds. Powles was a 
 lavish spender ; the Tatler was but one of his 
 expenses ; and his vehemently sanguine tempera- 
 ment rendered him heedless of the costs and 
 
 235 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 losses of to-day in view of the big profits which, 
 according to his calculation, must inevitably begin 
 to roll in to-morrow. It did not take long to 
 discover — for he was the least reticent of men — 
 that his capital was suffering haemorrhage at every 
 pore, of which the paper was but one ; or rather 
 that he was counting upon the paper to feed his 
 capital, instead of economising his capital to nurse 
 the paper till it could run alone. In short, he 
 was trusting one losing concern to support a dozen 
 others. To such a business method there could 
 be but one end ; and I was less surprised, at the 
 end of about a year, to learn that he had come to 
 an end of his resources than, a little later, that he 
 had found another capitalist to relieve him of the 
 Tatler and of its liabilities to the date of the 
 transfer. I saw the capitalist ; but nobody ever 
 saw any of the capital. Inanition followed 
 haemorrhage : and the Tatler died. 
 
 Except myself, whose claims for arrears of 
 salary and various expenses had been transferred, 
 with my own consent, to the new capitalist, I am 
 quite sure that nobody to whom anything was 
 due was left unpaid. Powles had one — not mean- 
 ing only one — admirable quality : he would beggar 
 himself, as a matter of course, rather than not pay 
 every penny that he owed, or that he thought he 
 owed, or that anybody else thought he owed. 
 236 
 
Louis Diston Powles 
 
 He had influence enough in the right quarters, as 
 well as sufficient professional standing, to get sent 
 out as Circuit Magistrate to the Bahamas ; in 
 which capacity, however, he contrived so mortally 
 to offend the white portion of their inhabitants by 
 his opinion of it, publicly expressed from the 
 bench in too characteristically strong terms, that 
 he had to be recalled. But, after all, one can 
 afford to be one's own foe if Fortune is deter- 
 mined to be one's friend. She obtained for him 
 the appointment of Probate Registrar for Norfolk, 
 and so enabled him and his most patient of wives 
 to pass the rest of his days in competence and 
 ease. I do not suppose that a Probate Registry 
 provides many opportunities for indiscretion. If 
 it did, he would assuredly have seized them ; and 
 if he had — for our friendly and his confidential 
 intercourse did not cease with the Tatler — I 
 should have known. 
 
 The twelve months ending with January, 1878, 
 had certainly been of what is now termed the 
 "strenuous" order. Besides editing the Tatler 
 I had contributed to its contents over thirty 
 articles, a great number of its " Notes Current," 
 a short story, and much other matter. During 
 the same period I had written half a novel 
 and a short story for All the Year Round; my 
 Annual (equivalent to a one-volume novel) for 
 
 237 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 the Gentleman s, and a long story for the same ; 
 a story for London Society ; four or five articles 
 for May/air, at the request of its editor, Sir 
 Henry Lucy — he not yet "Sir" Henry, nor 
 " Toby " as yet M.P. ; and all reviews of fiction 
 for the Globe. One's own reminiscences, omit- 
 ting so well-remembered a portion of them as 
 one's own work, would be so conspicuously 
 defective that I will deliberately give my reader 
 an opportunity for skipping by giving the statis- 
 tics of my literary and journalistic work from its 
 outset with " Grace Owen's Engagement " in 
 July 1868 to the end of the same month in 1880, 
 when it takes a new and well-marked departure — 
 that is to say for my first twelve years. The 
 result (errors excepted) gives fourteen novels ; 
 five other serial stories ; fifteen stories, each in 
 a single number of its magazine ; two long 
 magazine articles ; a hundred and twenty-five 
 newspaper articles ; eleven of what I must, out 
 of courtesy to myself, call poems, for want of 
 any more modest name ; two cantatas and fifteen 
 song-words for music ; eight hundred and thirty 
 notes on current topics ; and four hundred and 
 ninety-six notices of new books, mostly fiction. 
 Most of the articles in May/air, all in the 
 Pen — a literary journal conducted by Mr. Wilfrid 
 Meynell on high principles which should have 
 238 
 
Novels and their Titles 
 
 ensured it a long career — were covered by the 
 eighteen months that followed the Tatlers 
 demise ; and during the first six of these ran 
 my novel of " Strange Waters" through All the 
 Year Roimd. I cannot say that I deplored, for 
 my own sake, my downfall from an editorial 
 throne whereof the cushions had proved to be 
 stuffed, even to bursting, with thorns. I deplored 
 rather that dinner at the St. Stephen's, which 
 had left me, in its consequences, only too 
 appreciably poorer than before the soup was 
 served. 
 
 I cannot call " Strange Waters " a happily 
 chosen title. There seems to be little or no 
 trouble about the choice of a title now. The 
 name of a novel has ceased to have any 
 necessary connection with its subject — super- 
 ficial attractiveness is all that is required. We 
 simple Mid-Victorians, however, used to suffer 
 from a superstition that the title was bound to 
 have some inseparable connection with subject, 
 character, or story. It may be remembered how 
 Wilkie Collins was put to it to find a logical 
 as well as an attractive title for "A Woman in 
 White " ; and few of us failed to suffer in a 
 similar way. Then there was the fear, scarcely, 
 I suppose, yet altogether at an end, of inventing 
 an excellent title that somebody else had, with 
 
 239 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 equal originality, invented before. I had at first 
 intended to call " A Dog and his Shadow " by 
 the much more appropriate and intelligible title 
 (as I think) of "A Beggar on Horseback." 
 Somebody, however, told me that the title had 
 been preoccupied by James Payn. The British 
 Museum Catalogue failed to confirm the infor- 
 mation ; but the informant was sure. So I wrote 
 to Payn himself: and was courteously told that 
 he had written "A Beggar on Horseback" as 
 a serial, but that the title had to be altered 
 on publication in book form in deference to a 
 prior claim. Then there was the case of my 
 " Ropes of Sand," in the Illustrated London 
 News. The title was the text and very essence 
 of a plot suggested by the legend of the demon 
 set to the endless and barren labour of twisting 
 into cables the sands of a sea-shore. It had, 
 of course, been duly announced long enough 
 beforehand ; but barely a week before the 
 appearance of the first instalment a lady laid 
 claim to the title as by right of priority hers : 
 and that she had thus much of customary right 
 was easily ascertained. It was too late to change 
 the widely advertised title without worse than 
 mere inconvenience : much too late to adapt 
 the story, and much of the illustrator's work 
 also, to any new one. It really looked as if 
 240 
 
The " Oasis " 
 
 the postponement of the claim to the very last 
 moment had created a fix from which purchase 
 of the right would be the only feasible extrication. 
 By the merest accident, however, somebody to 
 whom the fix was mentioned remembered 
 ••Ropes of Sand" in connection with the name 
 of Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), from 
 whom we learned, through an exchange of tele- 
 grams, not only that his use of the title had 
 antedated its claimant's, but that he made it 
 over to the Illustrated Loiidon Neivs with the best 
 of good will, so far as no yet more previous use 
 allowed him the power. So my novel is at any 
 rate •• Ropes of Sand " the Third, and may be 
 the Thirtieth for aug^ht I know. 
 
 To pass from work to play — about this time 
 a number of those who were more or less 
 associated in the former and wished for more 
 opportunities of association in the latter drifted 
 into a quaint kind of club named the Oasis, as 
 a rest and refreshment in a wilderness of work 
 and worry. It answered its purpose very well 
 for its score or so of •' Cousins," as we called 
 ourselves — Cousin of Ipswich, or of Cork, or 
 of Gloucester, as the case might be — so long 
 as, like the Decemviri, our ways lay sufficiently 
 together. We met at stated times, usually for 
 dinner, the place of honour being invariably 
 
 R 241 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 accorded to the so-called " Silent Cousin " — a 
 human skull. This had originally been brought 
 to one of the meetings by a medical Cousin, 
 Dr. O'Connor, and gradually grown into this 
 fetish-like distinction. The proceedings, though 
 never — in those already degenerate days — soaring 
 to the " High Jinks" of Counsellor Pleydell and 
 his companions, were unquestionably inspired by 
 that eminent advocate's apology to Colonel 
 Mannering — " There are folks before whom one 
 should take care how one plays the fool : because 
 they have either too much malice, or too little 
 wit." At any rate we had wit enough for non- 
 sense ; and what more is wanted by people who 
 meet because they are tired of trying to be 
 clever — or, harder toil still, of trying to seem 
 so ? So we e'en let ourselves go. But we 
 had our rules, which our " Patriarch " during 
 his term of office had punctiliously to enforce ; 
 and an elaborate Masonic sort of ritual. Our 
 first Patriarch was Archibald MacNeill : the 
 journalist who, while on his way back from a 
 professional visit to Paris, was last seen just 
 before his steamer left Boulogne, and never 
 again. His sudden disappearance, absolutely 
 without the slightest personal cause, remains, 
 though anxiously and thoroughly investigated 
 by his friends at home and by the French 
 242 
 
Regent's Park Terrace 
 
 police, a mystery still, only to be reasonably 
 accounted for by robbery and murder. He was 
 the straightest and most open-lived of men, 
 certainly without an enemy, and, so far as the 
 strictest inquiry could elicit, without a single 
 care. His fate, however, whatever it was, did 
 not befall till a considerable time after the last 
 meeting of the Oasis, which further included 
 among its members Richard Gowing, Julian 
 Hawthorne, Christie Murray, and Rudolf Blind, 
 the artist, the son of Karl. It was never dis- 
 solved ; and from my five or six still surviving 
 "Cousins" I trust I may count upon as kindly 
 a remembrance of me as is mine of them, and 
 of the days, or rather the nights, of auld 
 lang syne. 
 
 This, too, seems the most fitting place for 
 recalling to some few, now too few, other 
 memories than my own — my wife's Wednesday 
 evenings in Regent's Park Terrace, which for 
 some years during the later 'seventies and earlier 
 'eighties were to our circle what the Sundays of 
 the Marstons and the Hardys had been to theirs, 
 and to some extent included theirs, by reason 
 of considerable overlapping. Her evenings were 
 naturally of a more musical character, and I can 
 still hear the voices in song of Edith Wynne 
 ("Eos Cymru " — Nightingale of Wales), whom 
 
 243 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 we had seen married to an Armenian barrister in 
 the Chapel of the Savoy, and of Grace Damian, 
 the young contralto, then at the outset of what 
 promised to be a brilliant career. I am not sure 
 whether Mme. Parepa-Rosa was ever present on 
 any occasion, though we knew her well — Carl 
 Rosa, by the way, had been one of my wife's 
 contemporaries at Leipzig. My wife's sister, 
 also, now and then sent us a musical visitor from 
 her side of the Atlantic : notably Dr. Eichberg, 
 the German violinist, to whom Boston had given 
 a refuge and a home, and presently the homage 
 of disciples to a master. His widow, still a 
 charming young woman at over eighty, and their 
 daughter, Mrs. John Lane, are still among my 
 friends. Not that our music was invariably up 
 to " concert pitch." Mr. T. P. O'Connor, a 
 frequent and ever-welcome visitor, may remember 
 a lady's impassioned rendering of " The Wearing 
 of the Green." And I wonder whether any living 
 amateur, even if lodging and boarding in the very 
 cheapest of suburban backwaters, with a family 
 that advertises itself as " musical," has any know- 
 ledge of the sentimental twaddle that formed the 
 staple of the songs sung in the drawing-rooms of 
 our time. If by any chance he has, he or she will 
 know the name of Miss Elizabeth Philp, who 
 was among the most popular offenders in that line 
 244 
 
Dr. Franz Huefter 
 
 of business. And if so, he or she will be dismayed 
 to learn that Miss Philp was a thoroughly good 
 fellow, with a bluff, downright manner, and a 
 moustache fit for a dragoon, who, at the end of 
 an evening, and with an audience reduced to a 
 few on whom a little frivolity would not be thrown 
 away, would, by special request, break into — not 
 into any stuff of her own : she had too much 
 sense for that — but into the lamentations of 
 " Betsy Waring," who went " out a-charing," and 
 wound up with a realistically rheumatic yell 
 calculated to startle the inhabitants of the neigh- 
 bouring Zoological Gardens into a howl of 
 sympathy. 
 
 I have spoken of our house on its Wednesdays 
 as common ground of several interesting circles, 
 and Dr. Franz Hueffer was their common point 
 of intersection — an assertion which shows, not 
 my ignorance of geometry, but my acquaintance 
 with Dr. Hueffer. For he was ubiquitous : at 
 whatever point one touched the circumference of 
 any circle, there, conspicuously, was he. I first 
 met him at the Marstons', where a foreigner was 
 a rarity : how or whence he came there nobody 
 seemed to know. Nor, for that matter, after a 
 first moment of casual curiosity, did anybody 
 seem to care to know. One may take for granted 
 that he did not come to London without influential 
 
 245 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 introduction based upon solid reputation at home ; 
 but, even so, never can there have been a case of 
 more instant and matter-of-course acceptance of a 
 stranger on his intellectual merits alone, without 
 any sort of prestige to herald him, or personal 
 charm. Another man might have possessed all 
 his encyclopaedic attainments, as scholar, linguist, 
 musician, and every advantage of prestige and 
 personality to boot, and yet have had to spend 
 many pushful years in achieving the position into 
 which Hueffer stepped at once, and apparently 
 without the slightest effort of his own. Quiet 
 and unpretentious in manner, he never seemed 
 to seek so much as recognition, much less dis- 
 tinction ; but it came. I do not know that he 
 turned his depth and width of knowledge to any 
 public account. But there it was, and nobody 
 thought of questioning his authority on any subject 
 he pleased. 
 
 Among his specialities was the poetry of the 
 Troubadours. Equally remote from common 
 knowledge, at least during the 'seventies and 
 'eighties, was Ralston's, of the British Museum — 
 namely, Russian language and literature. He 
 once told a number of Russian folk stories to a 
 delighted audience in St. James's Hall, among 
 whom I remember Carlyle, old, bent, and feeble, 
 wrapped in a shepherd's plaid, and reverently 
 246 
 
Miss Sheddon 
 
 supported to his seat by the lecturer's arm. Far 
 down sideways had the lecturer himself to stoop 
 to give the support so pathetically needed, for 
 his growth had left six feet — I forget by how 
 many inches — far behind ; but to be gracious is 
 better than to be graceful. Ralston had inherited 
 a claim to a great estate and fortune which, 
 however, he did not care to pursue, whether out 
 of a philosophic indifterence to riches, or of a 
 prudent avoidance of the uncertainties and 
 anxieties of litigation, or of consequent inter- 
 ference with his chosen pursuits, or of the 
 indolence that so often goes with an abnormal 
 number of feet and inches, or of a combination 
 of some or all of these considerations, I do not 
 know. But he had a sister, Miss Sheddon, who 
 was neither indifferent, nor prudent, nor indolent. 
 She devoted herself to the prosecution of the 
 claim, and it was she who, when it reached its 
 final stage, addressed the House of Lords in a 
 speech of extraordinary ability three whole weeks 
 long. B. T. Williams had frequendy advised her 
 on legal points that arose during the progress of 
 the suit, and told me that for grasp of facts, and 
 in the mastery of complicated questions of English 
 and Scottish law, she had not a superior at the 
 Bar. I think my last piece of professional work 
 was to look up one such point to which he was 
 
 247 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 unable to attend. I met her once : and carried 
 away the impression that her brother had chosen 
 the wiser part, and that even if she won her battle 
 she had lost all that makes life, and especially a 
 woman's life, worth living. As Alan Fairford 
 wrote to Darsie Latimer concerning the case of 
 Poor Peter Peebles versus Plainstanes : " I must 
 allow that my profession had need to do a great 
 deal of good if, as is much to be feared, it brings 
 many individuals to such a pass." Who was it 
 that suggested the formation of a company for 
 bringing frivolous actions against eminent lawyers ; 
 who, as knowing the nature of a law suit, might 
 be counted upon to pay on demand rather than 
 defend ? 
 
 Are there still readers of " Hugh Conway's" 
 " Called Back " — the story in a then new manner 
 that in 1883 at once took the whole novel-reading 
 world by storm, kept readers, however sensation- 
 proof they might esteem themselves, out of their 
 beds, and was recognised by those whose business 
 was to watch literary tendencies, as a new de- 
 parture in popular fiction — and not, as many of 
 them predicted, for the better ? One critic, who 
 took his responsibilities very seriously indeed, 
 declared to me that the success of " Called 
 Back " meant the ruin of English fiction for ever. 
 As things turned out, I think it will be allowed 
 248 
 
" Hugh Conway " 
 
 that the early 'eighties did contain the date of the 
 beginning of a revolution in the character of 
 demand and supply. For this there were of 
 course many reasons, some obvious, some obscure. 
 But, looking back, with the advantage of these 
 thirty years of later light, I am as sure as ever 
 that " Called Back " was not only a signal of the 
 revolution but one of its active influences, in 
 default of which a new departure might have 
 been postponed or have taken another form. In 
 literary economy, at any rate, supply often pre- 
 cedes demand ; and no historian of British fiction 
 can afford to dismiss " Hugh Conway's" novel as 
 a mere sensational romance that was lucky enough 
 to get more than the proverbial nine days of 
 extraordinary vogue. It was the last novel that 
 everybody read and talked about ; not merely the 
 portion of everybody that has read, or the smaller 
 portion that has discussed, outside print, the most 
 popularly successful novel of the following thirty 
 years. I could not contrive to care for it on its 
 merits, though I had been acquainted with "Hugh 
 Conway," under his everyday name of Frederick 
 John Fargus, for some years before it appeared, 
 and took therefore a more friendly than hopeful 
 interest in its prosperity. Fargus was about the 
 last man from whom one would have expected a 
 sensation of that sort — an auctioneer, with plenty 
 
 249 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 of business, at Bristol, where his novel found its 
 fortunate publisher ; without literary connections, 
 or any previous literary reputation. My first 
 knowledge of him was as the writer of some little 
 poems sent me for my opinion, and graceful 
 enough in form and conception to be accompanied 
 with a compliment when returned. The next 
 step in our acquaintance was his sending me a 
 story of which I forget both title and subject, but 
 which, I do remember, was not in the least prog- 
 nostic of " Called Back," and struck me as fit for 
 recommendation to John Blackwood. He called 
 on me when, soon after this, business brought 
 him to London ; and never failed afterwards to 
 visit us of a Wednesday evening when he 
 happened to be in town. I do not think, how- 
 ever, that he extended his acquaintance beyond 
 myself thereby. For he was almost, if not quite, 
 as deaf as a post ; so that attempted introductions 
 were only too apt to fail, when everybody else 
 knew everybody else, and it was not easy to hear 
 one's own self s voice at times. 
 
 Among our neighbours of Regent's Park, of 
 whom we saw much on these and other occasions, 
 were the Hepworth Dixons. Dixon I remember 
 as without a rival in the difficult art, perhaps the 
 most difficult of all arts, of after-dinner speaking. 
 Its most prominently recognised professors were 
 250 
 
After-Dinner Speakers 
 
 unquestionably Sir Frederick Leighton, Edwin 
 Arnold, and George Augustus Sala. But the 
 first was too rhetorically florid ; his elaborately 
 polished but monotonously fluent eloquence was 
 fitter for delivery from a platform or a pulpit than 
 where lectures or sermons are the last things that 
 men meet to hear. Besides, his high-pitched, 
 rather rasping voice was irritating to sensitive 
 ears. Arnold was too egotistical. There was 
 one favourite point which he never failed to make 
 — at least I must presume so, seeing that he 
 never did fail, so much as once, to drag it into 
 any and every speech of his that came, as not 
 seldom happened, in my way. •' When first," he 
 used in all seriousness to tell us, " I saw the 
 announcement of a daily newspaper for a penny, 
 I said to myself, ' That will be either the greatest 
 of blessings or the greatest of curses : / must be 
 there ! ' " That, but for him, the Daily Telegraph 
 might have been a curse instead of a blessing, 
 his hearers would be allowed to conclude. My 
 inability to recall the characteristic merits or 
 demerits of Sala as an after-dinner speaker is 
 some evidence, to myself at least, that he did not 
 display conspicuously much of either — but then 
 his reputation had no doubt been won before my 
 time, and a reputation of that sort is harder to 
 lose even than to gain. Dixon had the several 
 
 251 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 happy knacks of adapting himself to the occasion 
 whatever it might be ; of never giving the impres- 
 sion of previous preparation ; of an easy, conver- 
 sational style ; and, above all, of knowing exactly 
 how and when to sit down. And whoever can, 
 with an apparently modest self-assurance, bring 
 these principles into united practice has mastered 
 what I have deliberately called the most difficult 
 of all the arts that are. None of its American 
 practitioners have I happened to hear. 
 
 Another near neighbour and visitor was the 
 wife of Charles Dickens. Of course I have 
 known it to be taken for granted that she was the 
 Dora of " David Copperfield." Anything more 
 absurd was never assumed, unless she had under- 
 gone a miraculous change of nature between youth 
 and middle age. Without that, the shrewd, 
 sensible, practical Scotswoman, with the hearty 
 laugh, had assuredly never been Dora. I suspect, 
 though solely by way of a guess, that some in- 
 capacity for unlimited idolatry, or at any rate for 
 being blind to specks and foibles, was the real 
 root of the matrimonial muddle ; for, I suppose, 
 not the most thorough partisan of Dickens would 
 deny that he was too sensitively vain to put up 
 with any less worship than that of an uncritical 
 devotee. Of him I never heard from her the 
 remotest word. 
 252 
 
Our Neighbours 
 
 Next door to us in Regent's Park Terrace 
 lived Florence Marryat, Captain Marryat's 
 daughter, herself among the popular novelists 
 of her day, and, among many eccentricities of 
 character, a spiritualist of the most advanced 
 fashion. Neighbourhood, however, did not 
 develop into acquaintance, beyond recognition 
 v^hen we happened to meet at other people's 
 houses. With other inhabitants of the Terrace 
 we became on more or less intimate terms : 
 David Law, the etcher ; Mrs. Louis Diehl, 
 formerly, as Alice Mangold, a pianist of distinc- 
 tion, then the authoress of many novels of merit, 
 with a history of Greek philosophy thrown in — I 
 saw the announcement of a new novel from her 
 pen only the other day ; George Neville the 
 actor and trainer for the stage, Henry Neville's 
 brother; Dr. Lewis, an able physician, with an 
 interesting and far-reaching theory concerning 
 the correspondence of the constitution, functions, 
 and diseases of the human frame with counter- 
 parts in external Nature regarded as a single 
 whole : every man being thus a microcosm, or 
 complete image of the universe on a reduced scale. 
 So, as the Terrace consisted of no more than 
 twenty-two houses, with the occupation of more 
 than twenty-seven per cent, of them by authors, 
 artists, and scientists, we might be pardoned for 
 
 253 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 regarding ou7' Terrace as something aloof and 
 apart from any ordinary Terrace, Gardens, or 
 Square. And, on the whole, I think we were 
 corporately queer enough to merit ample recogni- 
 tion of our claim. 
 
 254 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 The Grap/a'c— Arthur Locker— The G/ode again—Captain 
 Carlisle, and others — The Marvin case— A small beer 
 chronicle : Fog : Fire : " G. A. S." 
 
 The middle of 1880 I regard, as I have said, as 
 the date of a new departure. Even as, without 
 definite or deliberate intention, I had drifted from 
 law to letters, so now I ceased to be a writer of 
 fiction who was also more or less a journalist, and 
 became a journalist who was more or less a writer 
 of fiction. Should any ill-natured critic sarcas- 
 tically suggest that I have stated a distinction 
 without a difference, I do not feel concerned to 
 reply. What has concerned me is that, just as 
 I had looked to literature to keep me going while 
 waiting for a sufficiency of briefs, I now looked to 
 journalism as a crutch to support the production 
 of novels ; and that in both cases alike the crutch 
 refused to be thrown away. 
 
 I had never ceased to review all new novels for 
 the Globe', and now, in 1880, I was asked to 
 undertake the same office for the Graphic also. 
 My acceptance of it proved to be the beginning 
 
 255 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 of a connection with that journal which lasted, 
 without a single break, till I resigned it in 191 2 
 — two-and-thirty years almost to a day. Under 
 its five successive literary editors during that 
 period I must have read — yes, read — and noticed 
 between six and seven thousand novels, and some 
 hundreds of other books, many of the most 
 important of these being dealt with in long and 
 full reviews : to say nothing of a number of Notes 
 of the Week and a couple of stories. It was a 
 connection on which I look back, in spite of its 
 length, with unqualified interest and pleasure ; 
 and with all my five editors, despite all character- 
 istic differences, I was always on the best of 
 terms. Only the first of them, however, falls 
 within the scope of these Reminiscences ; his 
 successors will, I trust live long enough to find 
 time and leisure to write their own. This was 
 Arthur Locker, who had been literary editor of 
 the Graphic from the issue of its earliest number 
 in 1869, and must therefore be credited with a 
 share in the success that attended it from the 
 very beginning. Whether his qualifications were 
 such as are required of an up-to-date editor of 
 to-day, I am by no means sure. He was of an 
 old-fashioned journalistic school which regarded 
 push, hurry, even advertisement, as odious as — 
 well, as they are. But the school was not yet 
 256 
 
Arthur Locker 
 
 old-fashioned : it was only passing out of fashion : 
 and meanwhile Arthur Locker was among the 
 very best of its representatives — courteous in the 
 fullest and truest sense, which includes form as 
 well as spirit ; sensitively considerate, yet an 
 always vigilant critic, capable of prompt severity 
 when the quality of " copy " fell short of what he 
 held its contributor to be capable of supplying. 
 I remember him with a personal affection which 
 I know to have been shared by all who knew 
 him, and especially by all who came under 
 his firm while gentle rule. I do not mean 
 to suggest for a moment that the standard of 
 journalism at its best has fallen lower than it 
 stood in his time. New conditions require 
 correspondingly new methods ; these may be just 
 as honourable as the old, and doubtless in most 
 cases are. But they at any rate imply a certain 
 loss of dignity and an openly commercial attitude 
 from which Locker, had he lived into such 
 changes, would have fastidiously recoiled, and to 
 which some of us who have lived into them can- 
 not manage to adapt ourselves kindly. 
 
 My next dive into journalism as a profession 
 (if such it can be called) proved an almost com- 
 plete immersion for twelve years. This was a 
 return to daily work on the Globe, under much 
 more exacting conditions than had prevailed dur- 
 S 257 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 ing the reign of Dr. Granville. Captain, after- 
 wards Sir George, Armstrong, now sole proprietor 
 of the paper, was his own editor, and it was as 
 assistant in that capacity that I engaged myself to 
 revise all editorial matter, and to write the leading 
 article thrice a week besides a daily " Note of the 
 Day." The conditions of the Globe had indeed 
 changed while I had been but its reviewer of 
 Recent Fiction. Its premises had been moved 
 to their present position on the opposite side of 
 the Strand ; and instead of our former pleasant 
 room, with its view of the river and the Surrey 
 hills — now occupied by the editor of the newly 
 established People — I was settled in one with 
 whitewashed walls, with no furniture but three 
 tables exactly alike and three chairs ditto, lighted 
 by a window just under the ceiling, and with no 
 view but that of a staring synchronised clock that 
 was never a fraction of a minute fast or slow. 
 That clock was the ruler of the room. For 
 whereas in Dr. Granville's time we did very well 
 if we started work at an easy ten and, without 
 any leader to write, nothing indeed but two or 
 three notes apiece, finished between one and 
 two ; now, work had to be started at nine sharp 
 and finished at twelve sharp in order to catch 
 certain trains ; and to get through one's leader 
 and one's note, on subjects never given out 
 258 
 
Work on the Globe 
 
 beforehand, with revising work as well, and ques- 
 tions to answer, took up every second of the 
 three hours. Then, for me at least, followed an 
 hour or two of such revision as could be post- 
 poned, as of what we called " Turnovers " and 
 " Middles." But this could be done at leisure ; 
 and fortunate I was in being able to share the 
 leisure with such an occupant of the second of 
 the three tables as Captain (he had held that rank 
 in one of the Highland regiments) l^homas 
 Carlisle. 
 
 To show what manner of man he was — " was " 
 is a sad word to write of him — a single recollec- 
 tion will serve. He had once written a novel, 
 which came to me in the ordinary course to review 
 for the Globe. It was utterly, hopelessly, desper- 
 ately bad ; and I said so. We used to slash in 
 those days. We liked to show how cleverly we 
 could break a butterfly on a wheel : so we called 
 trash, trash ; instead of hailing it, according to 
 present practice, as an epoch-making work of 
 genius, and generally saying of it what its pub- 
 lishers would like us to say. The novel was 
 anonymous. And with such bitter contempt did 
 I treat it that Armstrong, who knew its author- 
 ship, would, out of consideration for one of his 
 staff, have suppressed the review. It was the 
 author himself who insisted upon its appearance, 
 
 259 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 out of deference to a reviewer who, he urged, had 
 been trusted by the Globe to judge the novel, and 
 whose judgment must therefore stand. Never 
 had I seen or heard of Carlisle until my return to 
 the Globe : nor did he know anything of me 
 except as the ferocious critic of his solitary novel. 
 Yet nothing could have been kinder than his 
 reception of me into the room that we were 
 henceforth to share. Everything he could do to 
 ease my far from easy position he did ; and it was 
 not for some years after we had become intimate 
 and confidential companions that he confided to 
 me his authorship of the novel that I had so 
 scornfully condemned. Every day for twelve 
 years we spent from three to four hours together 
 at neighbouring tables in the same room ; and no 
 word ever once passed between us that I would 
 wish recalled. 
 
 Regular and punctual in all his habits as that 
 synchronised clock, and with a military stiffness 
 of carriage, he was the last man in whom one 
 would expect to discover the boyish spirit that 
 made him the comrade of his boys, sharing all 
 their interests, not merely as an affectionate 
 father, but for his own active enjoyment, and 
 as if he were actually one of them — one, like 
 Milton's Adam, of his own sons. But it was 
 certainly this same spirit, with its dash of 
 260 
 
Captain Thomas Carlisle 
 
 adventurous frolic, rather than any professional 
 
 zeal, that prompted his most notable piece of 
 
 journalism in the service of the Globe. In order 
 
 to explore some of the odd by-ways of life, he 
 
 took a crossing, and stood at it, costumed for 
 
 the part, and with broom in hand, in the character 
 
 of an old soldier brought to that condition. He 
 
 escaped the chance of recognition by any former 
 
 brother-officer — the crossing was in clubland : 
 
 and his receipts in pence (I forget the amount) 
 
 were enough to show that a crossing-sweeper's 
 
 was by no means a bad business in muddier and 
 
 less municipally managed times than these. On 
 
 another occasion he was one of a party of 
 
 Christmas waits : an enterprise which he found 
 
 required a strong head to stand one sort of 
 
 warm reception on a frosty night, and ears 
 
 proof against bad language in order to be 
 
 content with another. His notion of a holiday 
 
 was the hardest exercise he could find. A 
 
 hundred and thirty miles on a tricycle in a 
 
 single day must be the ne plus ultra of hard and 
 
 utterly uninteresting labour ; indeed I should 
 
 have thought it impossible. Yet twice did 
 
 Carlisle, when well into middle age, thus take 
 
 his pleasure — sixty-five miles from Notting Hill 
 
 to Stockbridge, and then another sixty-five back 
 
 from Stockbridge, mostly in the dark, to Notting 
 
 261 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Hill. If this was pleasure, as no doubt it was, 
 then the much-abused treadmill must have been 
 nothing less than joy. 
 
 The third table had several successive occu- 
 pants, each of whom left as soon as his note 
 was written, or whatever his work might be, so 
 that we practically had the room to ourselves. 
 Among those whom I remember as sitting there 
 were Mitchell, a distinguished Oxford man, a 
 member of the French as well as of the English 
 Bar, a winner of the Diamond Sculls, a champion 
 light (or was it middle ?) weight, who afterwards 
 went out to Bangkok as legal adviser to the 
 King of Siam. His notion of a holiday was 
 flying hawks on Salisbury Plain, of whom a 
 hooded pair would sometimes be perched at 
 hand, in waiting for their journey. Another was 
 Davenport Adams, the author of a well-known 
 dictionary of the drama. Another was Noble, a 
 specialist on Russian affairs, whom I remember 
 chiefly for three remarkable reasons : first, that 
 he never spoke unless spoken to, and then in the 
 irreducible minimum of indispensable words ; 
 secondly, that his copy never needed the altera- 
 tion of a single word ; thirdly, that he suddenly 
 vanished without, as was ascertained, owing 
 anybody a penny, but, on the contrary, with 
 money due to him. It was another case of the 
 262 
 
Dr. Sebastian Evans 
 
 disappearances whereof the mystery has remained 
 unsolved. 
 
 The editor of the People, then virtually 
 a branch of the Globe, occupied, as I have 
 already lamented, the pleasant room of pleasant 
 memories in the Globe's old premises in the 
 Strand immediately opposite the new. This 
 was Dr. Sebastian Evans, concerning whom, 
 when I made his acquaintance later, I wondered, 
 and I wonder still, how that paper, of all 
 papers, came to be edited by him, of all men. 
 That a Sunday paper for the million requires, 
 especially during its infancy, an editor of more 
 than ordinary ability, need not be said. But 
 it certainly does not require an extraordinarily 
 accomplished scholar in many literatures ; a fine 
 poet of a high order ; a skilled artist in colour and 
 line ; a learned antiquary who is more than merely 
 learned : and Sebastian Evans was all these. 
 Nor can I imagine a man who was all these as 
 feeling at home in the editorial chair of a Sunday 
 paper for the millions, who cannot reasonably be 
 expected to take the smallest fraction of interest 
 in Geoffrey of Monmouth, or St. Francis of Assisi, 
 or the legend of the Holy Grail. The People 
 has proved itself an excellently squared hole ; 
 but its first editor was assuredly a peg only too 
 super-excellently round, He did not retain what 
 
 ^63 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 must have been an uncongenial post much longer 
 than was to be looked for ; and the squarest of 
 pegs was subsequently found in Carlisle, who, 
 however, did not quit his table at the Globe. 
 Others whom I remember as passing through 
 our or a neighbouring room on their road to 
 distinction belong to a later date than the title 
 of this volume covers — E. V. Lucas, C. L. 
 Graves, and Arthur Morrison, novelist and 
 playwright, whose "Tales of Mean Streets" 
 were the opening of a new field of social ex- 
 ploration. 
 
 The Globe, to which I had looked to serve me 
 as a time-winner for fiction, inevitably came to 
 absorb me in its service. The series of annuals 
 for the Gentleman s, it is true, continued for 
 six years longer, till it came to an end with "A 
 Christmas Rose" in 1888 — its fifteenth con- 
 secutive year ; but those six years, and six more, 
 resulted in but one fijU-blown novel and hitherto 
 my last — " King or Knave?" first issued serially 
 in the People. I did, however, under the title 
 of " Gods and Heroes," produce one other work 
 of fiction ; though I certainly cannot boast of 
 the fiction as my own, seeing that it consisted 
 of the stories of classical mythology merely re- 
 told. As may well be supposed, twelve years 
 of daily routine were not fertile in incidents that 
 264 
 
The Marvin Case 
 
 call for publication — among which I do not 
 include private and personal sorrows ; such are, 
 or ought to be, secret and sacred things. The 
 hot water into which the Globe, with such 
 amazing indiscretion, let itself tumble in what 
 may be called the Marvin case had cooled down 
 before my return ; but it was recent enough to 
 be still a subject of office talk and speculation. 
 Marvin, it will be remembered, had been em- 
 ployed by the Foreign Office, at the regular 
 rate of tenpence an hour for outside temporary 
 work, to copy the draft of a secret agreement 
 between the British and Russian Governments 
 preliminary to the Congress of Berlin. How 
 so confidential a task, in a matter of which it 
 was of the utmost importance to keep the British 
 public in ignorance, came to be entrusted to 
 outside and virtually irresponsible hands, is 
 beyond guessing. The result was that the 
 Globe came out with a publication, not merely 
 of the terms of the document, which could have 
 been explained away, but of the document itself, 
 word for word. The utterly incredible account 
 of the matter was that Marvin, with no more 
 than the necessary allowance of time for his 
 copy, and without the minutest opportunity for 
 note or memorandum, had carried the whole long 
 diplomatic document so accurately away in his 
 
 265 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 head as to be able to sell it to the Press for 
 reproduction without the omission or alteration 
 of a single word. Such a feat of memory, if not 
 absolutely impossible — few things are — is so ob- 
 viously and grossly improbable as not practically 
 to be distinguished from impossibility. Such, 
 however, was Marvin's own story ; and, un- 
 satisfactory as that solution of the mystery was, 
 no member of the staff of the Globe when the 
 incident happened seemed able to suggest a 
 better. Might it not be that the Russian Em- 
 bassy could have thrown some light into the 
 darkness had it pleased ? It might have been 
 held politic to embarrass the British Government 
 by premature publication of the agreement, which 
 of course would be in duplicate. Marvin, too, 
 had closer connection with Russia, where he had 
 resided, than was usual among journalists of that 
 time, or than the officials of our Foreign Office 
 were presumably aware. These surmises are not 
 supported by a particle of knowledge. But, all 
 the same, a diplomatic stratagem is less unpre- 
 cedented and more likely than a feat of memory 
 so marvellous as to savour of miracle. 
 
 As I have forewarned the reader of this 
 chapter, the chronicle of such few incidents of 
 the Globe office as remain in my recollection 
 is distinctly of the flavour of small beer, One 
 266 
 
A Fog and a Fire 
 
 of them is finding myself one morning the sole 
 member of the editorial staff that a dense fog, 
 of the sort that once upon a time made London 
 famous beyond all other cities, had permitted to 
 arrive. That the paper did not miss its accus- 
 tomed midday trains is not so miraculous as 
 Marvin's alleged memory ; but neither is it very 
 far behind. Another morning I arrived at the 
 office to find that it had been completely gutted 
 by fire. During the long process of rebuilding 
 and refurnishing the entire staff had to work at 
 a single table, without over-much elbow-room, 
 at the office of the People, then lately transferred 
 from the Strand to Milford Lane ; and it was 
 anything but a joy to have to produce, against 
 time, a leader on a subject seldom or never 
 settled till a minute or so before it had to be 
 started, with one's close neighbour on the right, 
 perhaps, evolving wit for " By the Way," and the 
 one on the left busy with the minutiae of ecclesias- 
 tical affairs, in a general buzz of consultation, and 
 liable, in the throes of some stubborn sentence, 
 to be asked some sudden question. My third 
 incident is memorable, at least to myself, because 
 it gave me the only impression I have of George 
 Augustus Sala apart from after-dinner eloquence : 
 I wish it had been other than of Sala in a rage. 
 The Yorkshire Post was defendant in an action 
 
 267 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 that turned upon a point of journalistic custom. 
 The editor of that paper, with whom I had some 
 slight acquaintance, called upon me in London, 
 and, without any explanation of his purpose., got 
 from me, in the course of a craftily casual con- 
 versation, a favourable opinion. The result was 
 a subpoena to give expert evidence of custom at 
 the Leeds Assizes ; and when I reached the 
 court I found myself in company with Sala and 
 Joseph Cowen — the Joseph Cowen of Newcastle- 
 upon-Tyne — who had both been brought to 
 Leeds for the same purpose and in the same 
 way. We attended a conference with Waddy, 
 Q.C., who was to lead for the Post. Cowen 
 was amiable over the matter, and repeated the 
 evidence he was prepared to give in his soft 
 Northumbrian burr. But Sala was furious. He 
 had been dragged all the way from London to 
 Leeds, at his extreme inconvenience, against his 
 will. He knew nothing about journalistic custom 
 nor cared ; and if he went into the box he should 
 say so. So let them put him into the box — it 
 would be the worse for them ! He had been 
 tricked out of an opinion — " But that's Yorkshire 
 all over ! " he fired off, as he stormed away to 
 catch the next train to town. 
 
 The plaintiff's case broke down on some point 
 of legal practice before any witness, except the 
 268 
 
Expert Witnesses 
 
 plaintiff himself, was called. I know what has 
 been said of expert witnesses. But, judging 
 from what I received on that solitary occasion, 
 for fee and expenses, all for a trip to Leeds with 
 nothing to do when I was there, I should not 
 object to a subpoena in that capacity as often as 
 some plaintiff or defendant pleased, Yorkshire 
 or no. 
 
 269 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 The White Rose of Wynnstay— Order of the White Rose 
 — The prohibited Mass— The Stuart Exhibition— Whistler 
 a Jacobite— Charles Augustus Howell— The Sobieski 
 Stuarts— Rise and spread of interest in the House of 
 Stuart — Helps to history 
 
 In the year 1710, some gentlemen of Cheshire 
 and Denbighshire, representing the principal 
 county families within seven miles of Wrexham, 
 formed themselves into a professedly convivial 
 and unprofessedly political society which they 
 called the Cycle of the White Rose — " Cycle," 
 or circle, because its meetings were to be held, 
 every three weeks, at the houses of its members 
 in rotation: "of the White Rose," because that 
 flower was the traditional emblem of adherence 
 to the strict rule of Royal descent as held to 
 be of divine sanction. The badge of the House 
 of York had now become that of loyalty to the 
 cause represented by him whom some called 
 the Old Pretender, others the Chevalier de St. 
 George, others King James the Third. In 
 course of time the meetings came, for con- 
 270 
 
The White Rose of Wynnstay 
 
 venience' sake, to be always held at Wynnstay, 
 where, under each successive Sir Watkin Wil- 
 liams Wynn as its hereditary " patron," the 
 Cycle itself became, in fact, the Jacobite Council 
 of North Wales. But the remarkable feature of 
 its history is that this essentially Jacobite society 
 continued its meetings at Wynnstay without a 
 break till between 1850 and i860 — a continuity 
 of over a hundred and forty years : nor was it 
 till nearly so late as 1890 that its last surviving 
 member died. Moreover, there is good evidence 
 that its Jacobitism was a reality long after the 
 failure of the 'forty-five. How long, it is impos- 
 sible to say ; but no doubt the supremacy of its 
 convivial over its political character would be 
 gradual and slow. Jacobitism lingered in England 
 as a principle, indeed as a potential force, much 
 longer than ordinary histories tell. Did not 
 Dr. Johnson, speaking when George III. had 
 been on the throne for nearly twenty years, 
 declare that " If England were fairly polled, 
 the present King would be sent away to-night, 
 and his adherents hanged to-morrow".'* " If a 
 mere vote could do it," he went on to assert, 
 " there would be twenty to one." And his Whig 
 opponent had to admit that a poll of the people 
 of England on the question of Right would be 
 in favour of the House of Stuart, though putting 
 
 271 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 the majority at twenty to one might be going 
 too far. 
 
 While the last member of the Cycle who had 
 attended a meeting at Wynnstay was still living, 
 provision had been made for the continuity of 
 its tradition. In the light of recent research, 
 conventional history was already falling into 
 some discredit ; and especially was this the case, 
 as concerned this country, with the period from 
 the accession of Charles I. to that of George III. 
 Popular history is pretty certain to be written in 
 the interest of the winning side, ignoring incon- 
 venient truths and stereotyping convenient errors. 
 Not that this necessarily implies any conscious 
 dishonesty. One so-called historian used to take 
 for granted what he had learned from another, 
 and never thought of testing it by original in- 
 vestigation. The worse than merely careless 
 omissions and misstatements of Macaulay, and 
 the gross ignorance displayed by Thackeray in 
 his portraiture of the young Prince in " Esmond," 
 are but extreme examples of how history used 
 to be written. How it ouorht to be written is 
 better understood than it was thirty or forty 
 years ago, now that all extant documents of the 
 past requisite for research — state papers, records, 
 and correspondence both official and private, 
 formerly buried away, forgotten, or unknown to 
 272 
 
Historical Study 
 
 exist — have been collected, arranged, and ren- 
 dered accessible : the historian has to be accurate 
 at his peril, for as surely as he commits a blunder, 
 with or without intention, so surely will it sooner 
 or later be spotted. A very short course of 
 documentary study sufficed to show that the 
 so-called history of Great Britain from 1625 to 
 1760 mainly consisted of the white-washing of 
 success and the black-washing of failure. The 
 history of a nation's past is, or should be, the 
 foundation of its future : to base that future upon 
 false history is to incur the doom of the man who 
 built his house upon the sand. Moreover, justice 
 demanded that the men who suffered for losing 
 causes should not be condemned off-hand on the 
 unquestioned authority of those at whose hands 
 they suffered. To let the most leading case 
 stand for all — King James II. may have been 
 a bigoted and cruel tyrant, and his adherents 
 knaves or slaves or tools or fools. William of 
 Orange may have been a pattern Christian hero. 
 The Revolution may have been the pure and 
 spontaneous exercise of a patriotic people's 
 sovereign will. Such had for generations been 
 the all but universally accepted historic creed. 
 " All but " — for there were already some not 
 unintelligent persons who could not allow that 
 •'may have been" logically amounts to was. 
 T 273 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 They asked, How would history have been 
 written had the Dutch invasion never taken 
 place, and had a James the Second kept his 
 crown, and been succeeded by a James the Third ? 
 Probably it would have been untrustworthy, as 
 representing nothing but success ; and for just 
 that very reason, the history of success must be 
 held untrustworthy as it stands. To get at the 
 truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
 truth, the history of the Great Rebellion and 
 the Revolution of 1688, with their intervening 
 and immediately succeeding chapters, must, they 
 maintained, be revised : appeal being meanwhile 
 made to the court of an educated public opinion 
 from the misdirections of partial or ill-informed 
 judges. No doubt in many, perhaps in most, 
 cases a belief in the divine sanction of sovereignty 
 had much to do with the demand, united with a 
 previous conviction that from the open truth of 
 facts their belief would have everything to gain 
 and nothing to lose. 
 
 This is a volume of memories, not of opinions ; 
 but in this matter the former cannot be intelligibly 
 reported without some assistance from the latter. 
 The opinions that I have thus and therefore 
 stated represent very much what had become 
 my own attitude towards political history and 
 historical politics before I discovered that they 
 274 
 
The Prohibited Mass 
 
 were shared by others, few, of course, but 
 numerous enough to have reorganised the Cycle 
 of the White Rose on Hnes better adapted to 
 later times. My discovery was made profes- 
 sionally, through having in hand, for the Globe, 
 an incident personally attractive to myself by 
 historic sympathy. Now well-nigh forgotten, it 
 made a considerable stir then, and, though it 
 would be held of no significance or importance, 
 it "caught on." In January, 1888, the late Earl 
 of Ashburnham, in a letter to the press, drew 
 public attention to the 31st of that month as 
 "the hundredth anniversary of the death of Prince 
 Charles Edward Stuart, called by some the Young 
 Pretender, and by others King Charles the Third," 
 and this reminder was followed by the announce- 
 ment of a solemn Mass to be celebrated at the 
 Carmelite Church in Kensington for the repose 
 of the Prince's soul. So unprecedented a project 
 promised to be of public interest, as proved to 
 be the case, especially when the Mass, for some 
 unimaginable reason, was prohibited by Cardinal 
 Manning. Certainly Manning was a Whig ; but 
 it is of course unthinkable that a prelate of his 
 Church refused its rites and its prayers to any soul 
 of its communion by reason of partisan prejudice; 
 while timidity, even had there been occasion for 
 it, was the last weakness with which he could be 
 
 275 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 charged. The Order of the White Rose had no 
 corporate connection with the matter. But it 
 contained at least two or three members of the 
 Cardinal's flock ; and from one of these, who had 
 taken a prominent part in the announcement of 
 the Requiem, I first learned of the existence of a 
 Society based on the principles that "All Authority 
 has a divine sanction, and that the Sovereign 
 power does not exist merely by the will of the 
 People or the consent of the governed," and that 
 " The murder of King Charles the First, and the 
 Revolution of 1688, were national crimes." 
 
 There is no advertisement like prohibition, as 
 Manning, had he been a novelist, a playwright, 
 or anybody else subject to censorship, would have 
 known. A revival of Jacobitism got talked about. 
 It is true that the notions of the man in the street 
 concerning the meaning of the term were apt to 
 be foggy. I have known several cases of con- 
 fusion of ]3.codi^e with Jsicodin ; and Greenwood's 
 paper, the Anti-Jacobin, was taken by some for a 
 counterblast to the pretensions of the White Rose. 
 I once met an ordinarily well-informed person 
 who took for granted that a Jacobite was a follower 
 of a then somewhat prominent politician of the 
 name of Jacoby ! On the other hand was a 
 revelation of a hitherto unsuspected amount of 
 Jacobite principle or sympathy throughout the 
 276 
 
The Stuart Exhibition 
 
 country. The Order of the White Rose, having' 
 emerged, or rather been drawn, from a modest 
 privacy into an outer and wider world, received 
 appHcations for membership from numbers of 
 persons who had hitherto imagined himself or 
 herself to be the last and solitary survivor of an 
 unsuccessful cause. And if the Order, thus 
 vitalised, had done nothing else for the revision 
 of history, no better service in the ever-needful 
 crusade against popular ignorance and consequent 
 injustice was ever rendered than by its conception 
 and inception of the Stuart Exhibition that opened 
 at the close of 1889 : at any rate, according to the 
 view that politics, without constant reference to 
 the still unsettled controversies of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries, are a mere muddle. Its 
 " Patron " was Queen Victoria, who took the 
 keenest pride and interest in the history of her 
 own Royal House of Stuart : for hers it was, no 
 less than its lineal heir's, and it was owing to its 
 being hers that she reigned, though few, except 
 herself, seemed to realise that elementary item of 
 dynastic history. Nor did she object to the 
 catalogue's designation of the three last Princes 
 of its name as James III. and VIII., Charles III., 
 and Henry IX. No doubt the warm personal 
 interest she took in the enterprise, as patron, 
 exhibitor, and visitor, helped it into unexpected 
 
 277 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 fashion. That it did " catch on," and to good 
 purpose, is shown by the best of all tests ap- 
 plicable to such experiments — the commercial : 
 the three months during which it remained open 
 resulted in a clear profit of over ^^2,000 from 
 admissions, after all expenses had been paid. 
 " Stuarts is hup now ! " was the explanation of 
 a dealer in old prints to a would-be customer 
 who considered the price asked for one of his 
 wares in that line inordinately high. 
 
 The amount of Jacobitism in the air naturally 
 suggested representation in the Press ; and on 
 the anniversary of CuUoden, 1890, appeared the 
 first number of the Royalist, in the form of a 
 small monthly magazine of thirty-two pages, 
 established as the authorised organ of the Order 
 of the White Rose. Its circulation was neces- 
 sarily limited. But it sufficed for a continuous life 
 of thirteen years, throughout all of which — with 
 the exception of the fifth — I edited it as a labour 
 of love, until the love, without lessening, became 
 no longer able to carry on the labour. In the 
 following year our maintenance of the insepara- 
 bility of past history from present politics was 
 illustrated with unusual directness by Gladstone's 
 introduction of a Bill for removing the remaining 
 religious disabilities, with the exception of those 
 attaching to the Royal Family, supplemented by 
 278 
 
An Irving Revival 
 
 Sir John Pope Hennessy's notice of motion 
 " That it be an instruction to the Committee 
 that they have power to insert a clause re- 
 Heving the Sovereign and the members of 
 the Royal Family from all religious disabili- 
 ties." A more sentimental, but not there- 
 fore less effective, fillip was given in 1891 
 to the current interest in the Stuarts and their 
 Cause by Henry Irving, who judged the state 
 of the atmosphere suitable for a successful 
 revival — and he judged rightly — of W. G. Wills's 
 " King Charles the First." In connection with 
 this, I possess an illustration of how history can 
 be written, and in what extreme need it some- 
 times stands of being revised. This is a cutting 
 from a leading daily paper, which tells how the 
 first-night audience comprised the members of 
 the Order of the White Rose wearing their 
 "insignia," and gives the names of Mr. and 
 Mrs. R. E. Francillon as among them. Now, 
 as a matter of fact, no member of the Order, so 
 far as I am aware, was present on the occasion ; 
 if any was, he certainly did not wear his badge 
 in public ; and for my wife and myself I could 
 prove an unanswerable alibi — she was at Chelten- 
 ham, and I at Berwick-upon-Tweed. 
 
 For that matter, no newspaper, by some queer 
 fatality, seems capable of complete accuracy in 
 
 279 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 any reference to the White Rose. Most sweep- 
 ing assertions have to be qualified by exceptions ; 
 but this is a rule without any exception that I 
 have ever met with, or of which I have ever 
 heard. Otherwise accurate obituary notices of the 
 late Lord Ashburnham stated that he was President 
 of the Order of the White Rose. But the Order 
 has no such official as President : and he was never 
 even one of its members, though of course, as 
 the representative of Don Carlos in this country, 
 he was in general sympathy with its legitimist 
 principles, and attended, as a guest, at least one 
 of its sessions. It does not follow that every- 
 body who accepts some or even all of its tenets 
 is or ever was on the roll of its Companions. 
 There has never been the slightest secrecy about 
 either its principles, its purposes, or its proceed- 
 ings. At its discussions and its dinners— for is 
 not the Order heir to the traditions of the White 
 Rose of Wynnstay ? and did not the White Rose 
 of Wynnstay most diligently dine ? — the guests 
 not seldom outnumbered the members. My pre- 
 vious remembrance of the many-sidedness of 
 Dr. Sebastian Evans in connection with the 
 People here runs on to one of these occasions, 
 when he returned thanks for the toast of the 
 Guests, with whom his name had been joined. 
 The Royalist, too, had much to thank him for. 
 280 
 
whistler a Jacobite 
 
 There were many with us, though not of us. 
 The only time that I met Andrew Lang was 
 when I happened to sit next him at a dinner of 
 the Fishmongers' Company ; but that single 
 happening enables me to report his interest in the 
 history of the House of Stuart as by no means so 
 purely non-political as his writings taken alone 
 might lead one to suppose. 
 
 But there was one not merely with but dis- 
 tinctly of us whose membership of the Order will, 
 I venture to say, defy the guessing of my most 
 ingenious outside reader. When I first saw the 
 roll of its Companions, great was my surprise to 
 see, high up thereon, the indubitable signature 
 of James MacNeill Whistler, with the appended 
 butterfly, to the declaration " I affirm the prin- 
 ciples of the Order of the White Rose." Not 
 only so, but I presently met my co-Decemvir 
 at one of the Sessions of the Order, and sub- 
 sequently at others. He had joined the Order 
 two years before my discovery of its existence. 
 That Whistler held legitimist opinions will sur- 
 prise most people : that he held them so strongly 
 and definitely as to enter a definitely legitimist 
 society will surprise them more : that so interest- 
 ing because so uncharacteristic an aspect of him 
 should have escaped the notice of even the most 
 intimate of his biographers, is more surprising 
 
 281 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 still. Collectors of artistic curiosities are aware of 
 the contributions from his pencil that have given 
 a special value to sets of that eccentrically able 
 periodical, the Jacobite Whirlwind, started by- 
 Mr. Herbert Vivian a few months later than the 
 first issue of the Royalist, and conducted by him 
 on militant lines that would of themselves, apart 
 from politics, suit Whistler's own temperament 
 down to the ground. My contribution to his 
 biography, otherwise incomplete, is that they 
 suited his politics besides. 
 
 What can I say of Charles Augustus Howell, 
 whose name crops up at every point and turn of 
 the history of Mid-Victorian art — of its inner 
 history, that is to say, as everybody who has ever 
 heard of Rossetti knows ? Of course I have read 
 or heard the usual stories told to his discredit : 
 and very good stories some of them are — almost 
 too good to be true. At any rate my own 
 experience does not enable me to confirm them, 
 much less to add to them. He was as much 
 a Portuguese as an Englishman, or more : and 
 his connection with the Order of the White Rose 
 came about through the interest he took in the 
 claim of Dom Miguel to the Portuguese throne — 
 an interest that could not by any possibility be 
 other than sincere. I suppose that, in this world 
 of mixed motives, few persons, unless of the 
 282 
 
Charles Augustus Howell 
 
 apparently extinct breed of martyrs, attach them- 
 selves to a combative Cause without a bit of the 
 gambler in their composition ; but that does not 
 denote insincerity in the choice of the Cause. 
 Fergus Mac Ivor vich Ian Vohr was not the less 
 sincere a Jacobite for counting upon an Earldom 
 as the reward of successful loyalty. I do know 
 that, with a knowledge of human nature as well 
 as of works of art, amounting to genius in their 
 combination, Howell never sought any advantage 
 to himself from his connection with the White Rose. 
 The advantage was wholly on our side : for he 
 was the most delightful of company, and if he 
 never did make financial use of his fascinating 
 personality, I can quite understand how well he 
 could have done so had he pleased. His humour 
 was irresistible, both in manner and in matter ; 
 and this though one might be unable to carry any 
 of it away. Nobody could be five minutes within 
 its reach without yielding, however unwillingly, 
 to its spell. I remember once going to see him 
 on an affair — an outside quarrel of some indirect 
 concern to the Order — which seemed to require 
 explanation on his part, and certainly on mine an 
 official predetermination not to be amused. I did 
 so predetermine, and, the gift of laughter not 
 being among my virtues, flattered myself that I 
 should keep my resolve. But I reckoned without 
 
 283 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Howell. He did not laugh. But he made, with- 
 out so much as a smile, such solemn fun of the 
 whole affair that / did, as never before or since, 
 even to the extremity of aching sides. Solutce 
 risu tabul(E. 
 
 I believe that there are still a few persons who 
 put faith in the pretence of the person styling 
 himself the Count d'Albanie to be the son of a 
 legitimate son of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 
 and, as such, the lawful sovereign of these realms. 
 At one time his believers, especially in Scotland, 
 were not a few. He was for many years one of 
 the sights of the reading-room of the British 
 Museum, where he was accustomed to display his 
 air of melancholy dignity — no professional actor 
 could have bettered the part of a dethroned King ; 
 his picturesque costume, frogged and furred, the 
 more pathetically effective for the apparent length 
 of its wear ; and the Stuart type of his features — 
 though that is by no means uncommon, and quite 
 as capable as other types of being emphasised by 
 a little management of expression and hair. With 
 these advantages, and with a literary reputation 
 besides, it is not at all surprising that he succeeded 
 in impressing the romantically disposed. Of 
 the merit of his contributions to English literature 
 and Scottish history I cannot speak, not being 
 acquainted with them. But he was also a reputed 
 284 
 
The Sobieski-Stuarts 
 
 scholar ; and I have seen a copy made by him of 
 a Latin life of St. Margaret of Scotland so crowded 
 with outrageously ignorant blunders, evidently of 
 a mechanical copyist without the faintest under- 
 standing of his original or slightest knowledge of 
 the language he was writing, as to suggest a 
 carriage of his Royal pretences to an equality 
 with those of the autocrat who declared that " I 
 am the Roman Emperor, and above Grammar." 
 It is true that his story was not to be compared 
 for likelihood with that of Naundorf, or of any 
 other of the Louis the Seventeenths ; infinitely 
 less so than Perkin Warbeck's. But the less 
 likely a story, the more acceptable to a certain 
 type of mind : and I have come across many who, 
 while not accepting it, still thought, however 
 illogically, that "there might be something in it" 
 if the whole truth were known. Now there was 
 an elderly lady, a Companion of the White Rose, 
 who professed — and I think justly — that she did 
 know the whole truth of the matter : she, and she 
 alone. She had been intimate with the family of 
 the self-styled Sobieski-Stuarts in her youth, and 
 would willingly have believed in the claim. She 
 could not : but out of affection for some of its 
 members chose to have her reasons for her dis- 
 belief buried with her. It is of course unfortunate 
 for searchers into historic side-lights that she did 
 
 285 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 not say less or more. But it is not important. 
 When there is no evidence in support of a claim, 
 the loss of some evidence against it need not 
 be deeply deplored. 
 
 Miss Roberts, by the by, was an interesting 
 person on her own account. An accident in her 
 childhood condemned her to support a deformed 
 and unwieldly bulk on crutches all her days. Yet 
 I doubt if life, on the whole, was ever better 
 enjoyed. She loved society, and she loved rule ; 
 and she gratified both pleasures by holding a sort 
 of court of her own, dealing out to those who 
 did homage exceedingly plain-spoken counsel, or 
 even commands. I cannot say that I found her 
 attractive. But others did ; and among her most 
 attentive courtiers and obedient subjects were 
 quite young men. Indeed, there was youth in 
 her atmosphere. Fifty is not too old to be 
 young ; and at one of her gatherings I had some 
 conversation with a well-dressed, well-set-up man 
 whom, judging from his looks and his talk, it did 
 not occur to me to take for over that age. But he 
 was ; for I learned later that he would be twice 
 fifty years old if he lived for two more. A very 
 slight hardness of hearing could not be counted 
 as a sign of old age, and he certainly showed no 
 other. This was a once noted artist, Schetky, 
 who had been Marine Painter to George IV. 
 286 
 
Order of the White Rose 
 
 Whether he lived to keep his hundredth birthday 
 I do not know. Old age is a disease that is apt 
 to come on very suddenly, almost in a moment, 
 when it has been abnormally long postponed. 
 
 Should I, as is exceedingly likely, be accused 
 of having, in dealing with the affairs and person- 
 alities of the White Rose, devoted an excessive 
 amount of space to an insignificant subject, my 
 apology is twofold. First — this being a chronicle 
 of my own memories, I must needs give pro- 
 portionate prominence to things and persons of 
 much importance to myself, of however little they 
 may be to the majority of others. Were it only 
 for the friendships that the White Rose has given 
 me, of which the best and closest still remain, 
 and assuredly will while life endures, I owe the 
 deepest personal debt of gratitude to its Order. 
 Its interests and associations, quite apart from 
 purposes and beliefs, have become too inseparable 
 from all my memories since my admission into its 
 companionship to allow of my giving them less 
 prominence than I feel to be their indispensable 
 due ; I have certainly not given them more. 
 Secondly, they do, after all, represent a change : 
 ineffective, no doubt, from any immediately, or 
 even remotely, practical point of view, but worth 
 more attention than it has hitherto received. 
 
 287 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 Fiction is an infallible gauge of the trend of 
 the popular sentiment of its own time. Five-and- 
 tvventy years ago a novel relying for its interest 
 upon the romance of the Stuart Cause was a 
 scarcely existent rarity : rarer still one that pre- 
 sumed any previous knowledge of the subject on 
 the part of the reader. Scott, so far as the read- 
 ing public in general was concerned, had become 
 a classic, defined as what everybody admires and 
 nobody reads. But such novels have, within 
 those same five-and-twenty years, become matters 
 of course ; indeed, there has been a flood of them, 
 of all degrees of merit or demerit, good, bad, and 
 indifferent, occasionally hostile to the Cause of 
 the Stuarts, as in the case of one young lady who 
 was bold enough to defend the massacre of 
 Glencoe, but ordinarily more sympathetic with 
 that cause than Scott thought becoming for a 
 Waverley, or a Markham Everard, or a Henry 
 Morton. It is unthinkable that more than five- 
 and-twenty years ago any of the amateur imita- 
 tions of the House of Commons once in vogue 
 would have drawn a full house for the discussion 
 of the Act of Settlement ; but when that did 
 happen within less than five-and-twenty years 
 ago, nobody thought it strange. How many 
 persons, five-and-twcnty years back, could have 
 told, off-hand, who, but for that Act, would then 
 288 
 
The New Political Education 
 
 have been, as the lineal heir of King Charles I., 
 the Sovereign of these realms ? Who it is has 
 by now become a matter of quite common know- 
 ledge ; and not only who, but how, and why. 
 These and such-like things may of course, and by 
 very many will, be dismissed with a smile as 
 passing trifles, curious perhaps, but not worth the 
 serious regard of a live generation burdened with 
 so many live interests of its own. But from no 
 standpoint can it be considered a trifle that the 
 paramount purpose of present-day Jacobitism, 
 namely political education by historic truth — the 
 whole truth, and nothing- but the truth — has during 
 the period made more than a mere beginning. 
 Within five-and-twenty years ago Macaulay was 
 the popularly accepted authority on the history of 
 the Revolution. It is now many years since I 
 met with any reference to Macaulay as an 
 authority on any subject whatever. Elaborate 
 and not far short of exhaustive studies of what 
 may roughly and loosely, for the sake of con- 
 venience, be called the Stuart period, have poured 
 from the Press in the form of biographies, essays, 
 and articles in the Reviews and Magazines, based 
 on the original documentary research without 
 which professed history is less trustworthy than 
 honest fiction. In the face of such a biographic 
 mass, it would require too tedious an effort of 
 u 285 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 memory to exemplify this outbreak of the historic 
 conscience. But it is impossible not to mention 
 such a feature of the Stuart Exhibition year as 
 the publication of the life of John Grahame of 
 Claverhouse under the title of " The Despot's 
 Champion " — a monument of diligent and scrupu- 
 lously unbiased research secure, it is safe to say, 
 from the remotest liability to any future addition 
 or correction. Of a later date than comes within 
 my scope is "The King over the Water," Miss 
 Alice Shield's life of James III. (nobody can 
 validly object to the designation of that Prince 
 officially adopted by the Historical Manuscripts 
 Commission throughout its " Calendar of the 
 Stuart Papers belonging to His Majesty the 
 King, preserved at Windsor Castle," presented to 
 Parliament by Royal command in 1903). But 
 I cannot forbear mention of a great history — 
 " great " not merely in such an opinion as I may 
 be qualified to express, but according to the 
 whole body of critical opinion, however unsympa- 
 thetic with its spirit. I know what time and 
 labour the author unsparingly devoted through 
 a long course of years to a work which she was 
 the very first to undertake : how anxiously she 
 verified every reference and statement ; how in 
 England, Scotland, France, and Italy she left not 
 an available document with any possible bearing 
 .290 
 
" The King over the Water '* 
 
 upon her subject unstudied, nor a locality un- 
 explored. The title-page ascribes the authorship 
 to " A. Shield and Andrew Lang," and it is 
 frequently referred to as the work of the latter. 
 The fact of the matter is that Andrew Lang's 
 share in "The King over the Water" consists 
 of the preface only, with some amount of advice 
 and suggestion. The whole of the research, and 
 the whole of its written result, are Miss Shield's 
 alone. It is curiously, and surely, significant of 
 the increasingly wide interest taken in the affairs 
 of the Stuarts that, whereas those same five-and- 
 twenty years ago there was no life of James IH. 
 in existence, within that period it occurred to no 
 fewer than four writers, independently of one 
 another, to supply the deficiency. One was 
 Miss Shield ; another biography was published 
 almost simultaneously ; a third came out serially 
 in a magazine ; a fourth was modestly abandoned 
 by its intending author on his learning that it had 
 been undertaken by other hands. 
 
 I wish I had no occasion to include in my 
 recollection of the origin and growth of popular 
 interest in Stuart history since the later 'eighties 
 the inevitable misfortune of every movement 
 great or small — the antics and fooleries of its 
 fools. There is, however, no necessity for 
 remembering them in print : they have been 
 
 291 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 only too successful in catching public attention, 
 and distracting it from the sane and solid work 
 that has already been to some appreciable extent 
 accomplished for the revision of history since 
 the Stuart Exhibition was conceived and pro- 
 jected by the Order of the White Rose. What 
 will be the result of the nearest approach to such 
 measure of full and final accomplishment as 
 human industry may be able to attain ? That 
 question must await further accomplishment for 
 its answer. Meanwhile the convictions of some, 
 and the suspicions of more, are well expressed by 
 so observant and prescient a writer as the late 
 H. D. Traill at the conclusion of his " Lord 
 Strafford " (" English Men of Action," vol. viii., 
 published by Macmillan in 1889): "The time 
 that has passed since the Revolution of 1688 
 is short indeed in comparison with the ante- 
 cedent period during which our own and other 
 European nations have been growing steadily 
 in strength and cohesion under systems which, 
 with whatever admixture of the popular element, 
 were in the main systems of personal rule. 
 Popular government has had as yet but a very 
 brief history : and when we compare the seven 
 generations or so of its existence with the ages 
 which preceded its establishment, we cannot 
 wonder that so many minds are recurring to the 
 292 
 
Helps to History 
 
 examination of abandoned political ideals, and that 
 the once imposing train of believers in the divine 
 right of Democracy is diminishing every day." 
 
 Few, however, though two hundred and twenty- 
 five years may be in the life of a nation, there are 
 still a good many millions of persons who regard 
 the creeds and controversies as having long 
 ago fallen into a practically dead slumber : as 
 being no longer of any use or concern to a 
 wide-awake world. " We care nothing for your 
 dormant creed," as one of De Quincey's critics 
 objected to his insistence upon the importance 
 of the comprehension of seventeenth-century 
 politics and political parties to the formation of 
 an intelligent view of those of every later time. 
 De Quincey's retort to his critic was : " A more 
 unwise saying it would be difficult to devise. 
 Creeds are eternal : if dormant, they may be 
 recalled to life ; if betrayed, they are open to 
 revindication " (" On the Political Parties of 
 Modern England," written in 1837). 
 
 Meanwhile the revised and corrected history of 
 the Revolution of 1688 has still all to be written. 
 I trust, however, that, when written, I may not be 
 among its readers. The date of its production, if 
 it be all that it ought to be, must needs be farther 
 off than I care to wait for. Life, according to the 
 proverb, is short ; but its shortness may be too long. 
 
 293 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 Quasi-reminiscences : political ; royal ; dramatic —Some 
 contrasts — Human limpets — "Let who will be clever" — 
 A memorable decade— Conclusion 
 
 I HAVE now brought myself to the year 1890: 
 nor by any stretch of licence can I make the 
 Mid- Victorian period extend a year longer. 
 Strict arithmetic, indeed, would divide the 
 Victorian reign into three equal portions of about 
 twenty-one years each : the Early, the Middle, 
 and the Late. The second of these should thus 
 open, nearly enough for landmarks, with the 
 proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of 
 India, and close with the Congress of Berlin. 
 I have, however, adopted the comparatively 
 undistinguished 1890 for my Finis inasmuch as 
 it happens in a very specially marked manner to 
 be the definite point of division between my past 
 and my present : between much that is living 
 reality, and the region wherein Memory reigns 
 alone. Besides, of politics and politicians, at 
 any rate of my own time, I have virtually nothing 
 to remember, as my previous chapters have 
 
 294 
 
Quasi-Reminisccnccs 
 
 shown. Of Gladstone I can but say vidi tantum, 
 though the vision was very close indeed. During 
 a pause in the amateur performance of a Greek 
 tragedy at the Westminster Town Hall, in which 
 the leading parts were taken by Companions of 
 the White Rose, I left my seat among the 
 audience to visit Mrs. Cashel Hoey, also a 
 Companion of the Order, in hers. She was 
 sitting next to Gladstone, between whom and 
 myself passed one of those formal introductions 
 in which neither party succeeds in catching the 
 other's name. I never heard him speak ; nor 
 Bright ; nor indeed any of the star orators of 
 any time, for which I am hopelessly unable to 
 work myself up into a state of regret or shame. 
 The only politician of historic mark whom I 
 have more than merely seen was Charles Stewart 
 Parnell, to whom I was casually introduced on 
 The Terrace ; and all I distinctly remember of 
 him was the air of boyish fun — altogether incon- 
 sistent with all I have ever heard or read of 
 him — with which he said to a parliamentary 
 colleague, " Let's go in and rile old Raikes." 
 Never but once did I see Queen Victoria. She 
 passed the Globe office on her way to open the 
 new Law Courts, but I was not fortunate in my 
 solitary experiences of Royal aspects, for, despite 
 all the reporters of her progress along a route 
 
 295 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 thronged with her loyal people, nobody could 
 ever have looked more utterly sulky and bored. 
 History does require revision : even the daily 
 history of one's own time. 
 
 Of the staore also it will have been Gathered 
 that my reminiscences are scanty. Of actors or 
 actresses off the boards I have met but few. 
 Dominick Murray of the Decemviri I have 
 already mentioned ; Miss Glyn (Mrs. Dallas), 
 Adelaide Neilson — beautiful exceedingly — and 
 Ada Cavendish were of the Marston circle, and 
 the last-named especially we came to know well : 
 Hermann Vezin, Henry Neville, George Gros- 
 smith, also already mentioned : these, ! think, 
 exhaust the list of the more notable names from 
 among those who, being dead, are still publicly 
 remembered. Nor, though my theatrical recol- 
 lections started so promisingly with Madame 
 Vestris and Charles Mathews, is my list much 
 longer of those whom I have never seen but on 
 the stage. I cannot speak either as habitual 
 playgoer or critic ; in this matter I cannot even 
 carry out my purpose (and I have no other) of 
 reflecting the distinguishing tastes and features 
 of my Mid-Victorian time, inasmuch as, while 
 so essentially of it in all other respects, in this I 
 was the rankest of unsympathetic outsiders. I 
 could hear Leah deliver her curse dry-eyed amid 
 296 
 
Some Contrasts 
 
 a surrounding flood of tears, and sec Buckstone 
 wink without a smile. The effect of the various 
 Hamlets, Charles Kean, Fechter, Irving, Wilson 
 Barrett, and the rest, has been to make me very 
 much of Charles Lamb's opinion " that the plays 
 of Shakespeare are less calculated for perform- 
 ance on a stage than those of almost any dramatist 
 whatever." I am quite willing to admit that my 
 lack of sympathy with the Mid- Victorian stage — 
 of its later periods I know practically nothing — 
 was owing to some natural defect of my own. 
 But I am not sure : I have recorded my im- 
 pression of Aimee Desclee. And I have more- 
 over some recollections of Ristori and Salvini 
 that provide me with the plausible apology of 
 having fastidiously set my dramatic standard too 
 high for attainment save by one or two in an 
 age. Still, it is but an apology for a misfortune : 
 for a misfortune it is to be discontented with less 
 than some ideal perfection that one has no right to 
 look for. 
 
 If I had fallen asleep on, say, my eighth 
 birthday, and not been roused for some sixty 
 years or so, the change in my surroundings that 
 would have struck me most, so as literally to 
 throw all others into the shade, would not have 
 been any of the big things by which we measure 
 
 297 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 Progress in one direction or another. It would 
 be one that short memories cannot imagine, 
 and that even long ones have generally forgotten 
 how to realise, so gradually and silently has it 
 happened, and so regularly, as to a matter of 
 course, have we at once adapted ourselves to 
 every step of the change. It is the homely, 
 every-day matter of artificial light. Nothing 
 makes me so doubtful of my continued identity 
 with myself as an attempt to take a sudden and 
 single backward bound into the darkness of 
 other days. In well-ordered and well-to-do 
 households, by no means behind the times in 
 their arrangements, the nursery or schoolroom 
 was considered sufficiently illuminated by a 
 solitary tallow candle that every few minutes 
 required snuffing — a process which frequently 
 meant snuffing out. In the drawing-room, a 
 pair of composite candles, attended by a snuffer- 
 tray, gave what was thought enough light for 
 reading or needlework at the round table in the 
 middle of the floor. It never occurred to any- 
 body to want anything better, so long as there 
 was nothing better to want. As in many other 
 matters, we were just as happy without what it 
 would make us very unhappy to be without 
 now. 
 
 Another institution which probably leaves the 
 298 
 
Outdoor Recreation 
 
 balance of happiness unaffected one way or the 
 other is what has come to be called the week- 
 end " habit " among whole classes that would 
 no more have thought of forming it in Mid- 
 Victorian time than of taking a flight through 
 the air. It is not among my impressions that 
 the classes I have in mind, such as the ordinary 
 professional and commercial, were consciously 
 restless and unhappy once a week from Friday 
 to Tuesday. And, in close connection therewith, 
 it was once upon a time, incredible as it must 
 now seem, found quite possible to have no Golf 
 and yet miss nothing. I doubt if I had ever 
 heard it mentioned, I am sure I had no idea of 
 what it was, until led by circumstance in which 
 it had no part to the links of St. Andrews. 
 The ordinary man of middle age, without means 
 or opportunities for sport, had practically no 
 substitute for it in outdoor games at all, unless 
 a bowling green happened to be within easy 
 access — not a common chance — and so to inspire a 
 possible liking for bowls. Indeed the ordinary 
 middle-aged man was rather disposed, in the days 
 before golf and lawn-tennis, to look upon all 
 outdoor games as being all right for schoolboys, 
 but otherwise as childish things, for grown men to 
 put away ; and even school games were coldly 
 tolerated, in official appearance at least, as re- 
 
 299 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 grettably unavoidable concessions to youthful 
 idleness and frivolity. And, however it may be 
 with the man of middle age, I am quite sure that 
 there has been, under changed conditions, an 
 immense improvement in the manners and customs 
 of the British boy since I was one of him. We 
 seldom, if ever, now meet with the shy lout, or 
 the systematic rebel, kos t is hicmani generis, ov the 
 bully, or the bully's victim, or the foul talker, or 
 the mere loafer, or the self-assertive prig, each 
 and all of whom I remember as quite common 
 types of Mid-Victorian boy. The type of his 
 Edwardian and Georgian successor — and my 
 impression is confirmed by all I gather from 
 experienced and competent observers — is a cour- 
 teous, sensible, modestly self-confident personage, 
 refined in manners and speech, and quite agree- 
 able company for anybody of any age who does 
 not find in total lack of originality a tendency to 
 bore. 
 
 The restaurant " habit," too, throws recollec- 
 tion back to when it was virtually non-existent, 
 if only for want of opportunity for indulgence. 
 For a woman, the pastry-cook's ; for the ordinary 
 man without a club, or too far from it if he had 
 one, the Cock, or the Cheshire Cheese, or Pym's, 
 or Prosser's, or Simpson's, to name only such 
 few of the resorts for a hungry but respectable 
 300 
 
The Restaurant "Habit" 
 
 bachelor as occur to me at the moment — that was 
 the recognised rule. Or if he was a bachelor of 
 enterprise, he could seek, and find, gastronomic 
 adventure about Soho and Leicester Square. But 
 a place where the two hostile sexes could repu- 
 tably as well as amicably meet for a real luncheon 
 or a real dinner was distinctly not the rule. 
 Everybody knows what is both the rule and 
 the custom now, and I have nothing to say in 
 favour of the old system except that a bachelor, 
 permanent or temporary, who knew his way 
 about, could dine under it to his heart's desire, 
 as to both meat and wine, though on a hard 
 bench in a dark " box," on a carpet of sawdust, 
 and where such an innovation as a table-napkin 
 was unknown. 
 
 In short, we Mid-Victorians were an essentially 
 home-keeping race, whenever we had a home to 
 keep. It is true that we carried out a great deal 
 of colonisation. But we were not globe-trotters, 
 taking us all round. When we left our homes, 
 or no-homes, here, it was usually to make homes 
 elsewhere, with only the vaguest, if any, prospect 
 of return. It is on the lower, and therefore 
 broader, social levels that the distinctive character 
 of a given period is best displayed, and whereon 
 its extreme illustrations are therefore to be looked 
 for. There was, in the early 'sixties, nothing 
 
 301 
 
Mid-Victorian Memories 
 
 extraordinary in the case of my gyp at Trinity 
 Hall, who, though an elderly man, had never 
 been in a railway carriage. It would be more 
 than extraordinary were there any such gyp now. 
 There is a certain quarter of the Royal Borough 
 of Kensington called Notting Dale, or the Pot- 
 teries, where the title of Woman is unknown — 
 " Me and another Lady " is a common example 
 of the proper form. Two or three years ago I 
 happened to become acquainted with one of these 
 Ladies of the Royal Borough, a very estimable 
 lady, willing, and almost able, to get through a 
 day's charing at nearly eighty years old. She 
 was still quite able, as well as willing, to take care 
 of a husband well over eighty, terribly crippled 
 with chronic rheumatism for more than thirty 
 years, but a fine old fellow still, who liked to tell 
 how, in what I gathered had been rather a stormy 
 youth, he " drank hard, fought hard, and worked 
 hard " ; how he had never known toothache, nor 
 lost a tooth except one in a fight ; and how he 
 could still draw a nail out of a boot with the 
 others. But that is by the way. The point is 
 that the Lady had been born in Notting Dale, 
 had been married in Notting Dale, and had 
 never set foot outside Notting Dale, scarcely 
 indeed beyond her native alley, once, save for 
 a single outing at the Crystal Palace, during the 
 
 ^02 
 
Human Limpets 
 
 whole of her nearly fourscore years. She could 
 not read, nor could her husband ; she had never 
 had more than that one solitary glimpse of wood 
 and water ; her whole world consisted of one single, 
 sordid slum. Yet she was a good, shrewd, 
 sensible woman — I beg her pardon, lady — even a 
 wise one, if contentment be really as wise as was 
 once supposed. Other Victorians, too, I have 
 met in her class who, Londoners born and bred, 
 had never seen, nor cared to see, the Thames. 
 And much higher up the social pyramid, say 
 midway, a holiday of Continental travel was rare. 
 Those who did travel, for business or pleasure, no 
 doubt got to know the countries they visited 
 better than is at all usual at present. They did not 
 find a little Britain ready for their reception in 
 every town. But then, on the other hand, they 
 had but few opportunities for the study of railway 
 stations and hotels. 
 
 " Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits." 
 Were our wits homelier, when we were young, 
 than the wits of those who are young to-day ? I 
 think they were. We were not a clever folk. 
 We had plenty of cleverness among us, of course : 
 but it was not plentiful enough for promotion 
 from exception to rule. It zs the rule — now. 
 So extensively diffused is it as to render its 
 occasional absence, not its normal presence, 
 
 303 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 observed. In no previous period has the average 
 of cleverness been anywhere anything like so 
 high. In literature, in art, in music, in drama, 
 in journalism, in scientific research, in mechanical 
 invention, in games, in advertisement, even in 
 philosophy — but there is no occasion to catalogue 
 the departments of human activity in which 
 cleverness can be displayed : for it is daily being 
 displayed in all, to an extent that creates a fogy- 
 like feeling in those whose lines were cast in a 
 generation of narrower interests and slower 
 brains. Even the clever fool, though he was 
 always more or less in evidence, has become 
 perceptibly less rare. John Blackwood used to 
 say that it was " a— confounded — clever thing 
 to write a novel at all." (I have taken the 
 liberty of weakening his epithet.) If it was — 
 confoundedly — clever then, it must be — con- 
 foundedly — clever now : and so, considering the 
 enormously increased rate of production, now 
 that not to have written a novel is a distinction, 
 how — confoundedly — clever a whole generation 
 of novelists must be ! 
 
 Yet, after all, "cleverness" is not a term of 
 high praise. Nobody calls Shakespeare a 
 "clever" dramatist, or Virgil a "clever" poet, 
 or Newton a " clever " mathematician, or Beet- 
 hoven a " clever" composer. While " clever " is 
 
 304 
 
" Let who will be Clever " 
 
 opposed to " stupid," it is also inapplicable to 
 Greatness. There seems indeed a decided incon- 
 sistency between the terms : and not only between 
 the terms, but between the things. It is quite 
 possible to be great without being at all clever: 
 it is certainly quite common to be exceedingly 
 clever without being in the least degree great. 
 And I think that the direct influence exercised 
 by Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Maurice, Darwin, 
 upon their own generation, and continued by 
 process of development into ours, corresponds 
 more closely with what all of us feel to be meant 
 by Greatness than anything of the sort that has 
 been experienced in later times. It may be that 
 we were then more liable, through our deficiency 
 in cleverness, to be intellectually impressed ; but 
 then it may be because of what nobody will 
 question — that there is at present nobody great 
 enough to be greatly impressive. And even in 
 the matter of my own " idle trade," as it has been 
 idly called, I suppose that any list of English 
 novelists of permanently high distinction would 
 certainly include the names of Thackeray, Dickens, 
 Charles Reade, George Eliot, George Meredith, 
 Anthony Trollope, Bulwer, Charlotte Bronte, 
 Charles Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins. 
 Some two or three of these were unquestionably 
 great : the greatness of others will be a matter of 
 X 305 
 
Mid- Victorian Memories 
 
 opinion : but all were at least eminent enough to 
 make memorable a certain Mid- Victorian decade 
 wherein were conspicuously represented all eleven 
 names. The new novels of 1851-60 included 
 "Esmond" and "The Newcomes " : "Bleak 
 House" and " A Tale of Two Cities " : " It is 
 Never too late to Mend " : '' Scenes of Clerical 
 Life," "Adam Bede " and "The Mill on the 
 Floss": "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" 
 " The Warden " and " Barchester Towers " 
 " My Novel " and " What will he do with it ? " 
 "Villette" and "The Professor": " Hypatia " 
 " The Woman in White." A few more years 
 would have brought in Mrs. Oliphant, and Black - 
 more's " Lorna Doone." 
 
 I began these recollections by maintaining it to 
 be everybody's duty to contribute his personal 
 impressions to the atmospheric record of his own 
 time, regardless of their importance, though little 
 or none. It is, after all, of the ordinary lives of 
 ordinary folk that the characteristic atmosphere of 
 any period is composed : the lives of great men 
 tell us but little of their times. The theoretical 
 duty has, on the whole, proved a practical pleasure, 
 so far as memory can ever prove a pleasure in a 
 parti-coloured world. And my concluding remem- 
 brance of a certain literary decade warrants me in 
 306 
 
A Literary Decade 
 
 claiming for the title of Mid-Victorian novelist no 
 small honour, while ascribing to the whole period 
 an atmosphere which, as second to none in every 
 vital quality, was good to breathe : — 
 
 Je ne suis pas la rose ; mais j'ai vecu pres d'elle. 
 
 Printed by Hazelly Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbuty. 
 
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